Tag: FASTA

Yes, Saturdays are somewhat weird days for software updates, but if you’re doing weekend work anyway, why wait to push bug fixes to the community? A very minor bug-fix update to Metaxa2 was released today, bringing the software to version 2.2.3.

Two things have changed in this version, both related to the genome mode. 1) We fixed a file reading bug in the ‘genome’ mode of the software. This bug caused the last sequence in an input FASTA file not to be read unless there was a newline after it. Since the ‘genome’ mode is rarely used by most users, we suspect not a lot of users have been affected by this bug.
2) While we were at it, we changed the behavior of the ‘genome’ mode to mirror that of the ‘auto’ mode, as the strict genome mode dropped sequences shorter than 2500 bp. We considered this behavior counter-intuitive to what most users would want, and has now changed the ‘genome’ mode to behave the same as the ‘auto’ mode and not drop short sequences.

No other changes have been made in this version. The update can be found at the Metaxa2 software page.

It’s been a while since the PETKit got any attention from me. Partially, that has been due to a nasty bug that could produce no output for one of the read files in Pefcon when using FASTA input files, but mostly it has simply been due to lack of time to continue development on the package. Now, I have finally put all threads together (bug fixes, new features, documentation) and today the 1.1 version is released! The new features are:

• A new tool has been added – peacat – that can be used to e.g. stitch contigs together that have been separated for one reason or another in an assembly
• Another tool – pemap – has been added that can be used to determine whether an assembled contig is from a circular DNA element
• The default offset value for FASTQ files has been set to 33 (as in Sanger and Illumina 1.8+ PHRED format)
• The documentation has been vastly improved (but is still rather inferior)

Some good and some bad news regarding the PETKit. Good news first; I have written a fourth tool for the PETKit, which is included in the latest release (version 1.0.2b, download here). The new tool is called Pesort, and sorts input read pairs (or single reads) so that the read pairs occur in the same order. It also sorts out which reads that don’t have a pair and outputs them to a separate file. All this is useful if you for some reason have ended up with a scrambled read file (pair). This can e.g. happen if you want to further process the reads after running Khmer or investigate the reads remaining after mapping to a genome.

Then the bad news. There’s a critical bug in PETKit version 1.0.1b. This bug manifest itself when using custom offsets for quality scores (using the –offset option), and makes the Pearf and Pepp tools too strict – leading to that they discard reads that actually are of good quality. This does not affect the Pefcon program. If you use the PETKit for read filtering or ORF prediction, and have used custom offset values, I recommend that you re-run your data with the newly released PETKit version (1.0.2b), in which this bug has been fixed. If you have only used the default offset setting, your safe. I sincerely apologize for any inconveniences that this might have caused.

You know the feeling when your assembler supports paired-end sequences, but your FASTQ quality filterer doesn’t care about what pairs that belong together? Meaning that you end up with a mess of sequences that you have to script together in some way. Gosh, that feeling is way too common. It is for situations like that I have put together the Paired-End ToolKit (PETKit), a collection of FASTQ/FASTA sequence handling programs written in Perl. Currently the toolkit contains three command-line tools that does sequence conversion, quality filtering, and ORF prediction, all adapted for paired-end sequences specifically. You can read more about the programs, which are released as open source software, on the PETKit page. At the moment they lack proper documentation, but running the software with the “–help” option should bring up a useful set of options for each tool. This is still considered beta-software, so any bug reports, and especially suggestions, are welcome.

Also, if you have an idea of another problem that is unsolved or badly executed for paired-end sequences, let me know, and I will see if I can implement it in PETKit.