Hands on Workshop: Introduction to Bioinformatics
Today we’re going to align sequence data to a reference genome useing BWA and explore what a BAM file is.
The first step is to set up a directory structure so the resulting files will be organized and copy the raw data to your home directory.
#Navigate to your working directory
cd ~
#Copy the reference directory to your working directory
cp -r /mnt/workshop/Topic_3/ref ./
#Copy the fastq files to your working directory
cp -r /mnt/workshop/Topic_3/fastq ./
#Make a new directory for your resulting bam files
mkdir bam
Once that is done, we have to index our reference genome.
#Index the reference for BWA.
bwa index ref/HanXRQr1.0-20151230.1mb.fa
Now finally we can run BWA and align our data
bwa mem \
ref/HanXRQr1.0-20151230.1mb.fa \
fastq/ANN1133.R1.fastq.gz \
fastq/ANN1133.R2.fastq.gz \
-t 2 \
-R '@RG\tID:ANN1133\tSM:ANN1133\tPL:illumina\tPU:biol525d\tLB:ANN1133_lib' \
> bam/ANN1133.sam
Lets break this command down since it has several parts: bwa <= We’re calling the program bwa. It’s installed in the /usr/local directory, which is in the default search path, so we don’t need to specify a path to the program.
mem <= This is the bwa command we are calling. It is specific to bwa and not a unix command.
\ <= Having this at the end of the line tells the shell that the line isn’t finished and keeps going. You don’t need to use this when typing commands in, but it helps break up really long commands and keeps your code more organized.
ref/HanXRQr1.0-20151230.1mb.fa <= This is the reference genome. We’re using a relative path here so you need be in /mnt/
fastq/ANN1133.R1.fastq.gz <= This is the forward read (e.g. read 1) set for the first sample. It’s also a relative path and we can see that the file has been gzipped (since it has a .gz ending).
fastq/ANN1133.R2.fastq.gz <= This is the reverse read (e.g. read 2) set for the first sample.
-t 2 <= This is telling the program how many threads (i.e. cpus) to use. In this case we’re only using two because we’re sharing the machine with the other students.
-R ‘@RG\tID:ANN1133\tSM:ANN1133\tPL:illumina\tPU:biol525d\tLB:ANN1133_lib’ <= This is adding read group information to the resulting sam file. Read group information lets other programs know what the sample name along with other factors. It is necessary for GATK to run later on.
> bam/ANN1133.sam <= This is directing the output of the program into the file bam/ANN1133.sam
We now have our reads aligned to the genome in a human readable format (sam) instead of binary format (bam) which we will use later. Generally we keep our data in bam format because its more compressed but we can use this opportunity to better understand the format.
#Lets examine that bam file
less -S bam/ANN1133.sam
#Notice the @PG line that includes the program call that created the sam file.
#This is useful for record keeping.
Lets examine the sam file. It contains all the information on the reads from the fastq file, but also alignment information.
#The next step is to convert our sam file (human readable) to a
#bam file (machine readable) and sort reads by their aligned position.
samtools view -bh bam/ANN1133.sam | samtools sort > bam/ANN1133.sort.bam
With this command we’re using the pipe “|” to pass data directly between commands without saving the intermediates. This makes the command faster since its not saving the intermediate file to hard disk (which is slower). It can be more risky though because if any steps fails you have to start from the beginning.
Next we want to take a look at our aligned reads. First we index the file, then we use samtools tview.
samtools index bam/ANN1133.sort.bam
samtools tview bam/ANN1133.sort.bam --reference ref/HanXRQr1.0-20151230.1mb.fa
#use ? to open the help menu. Scroll left and right with H and L.
#Try to find positions where the sample doesn't have the reference allele.
We have 10 samples, so we don’t want to have to type these commands out 10 times. Write a bash script to produced a sorted bam file for each sample.
A bash script is a plain text file (i.e. not rich text, nor a word doc) which contains bash commands. You can create the file on your computer and copy it over, or you can edit it directly from the server with one of the installed editors (this is covered in topic 2, Editing. The name of the file is up to you, but bash scripts are given the .sh extension by convention:
HINTS:
MORE HINTS:
for/while loops can receive input from stdin (or a file):
while read fname; do echo processing "$fname"; done < list_of_things.txt
You can do pathname manipulation with basename and dirname (see manual pages):
dirname a/b/c # prints a/b
basename a/b/c.gz # prints c.gz
basename a/b/c.gz .gz # prints c
fpath=/path/to/the/file.gz
base=$(basename "$fpath") # assign "file.gz" to variable base
echo "$base" # prints file.gz
#First set up variable names
ref_file=~/ref/HanXRQr1.0-20151230.1mb.fa
#Then get a list of sample names, without suffixes
ls fastq | grep R1.fastq.gz | sed s/.R1.fastq.gz//g > bam/samplelist.txt
#Then loop through the samples
while read name
do
bwa mem \
-R "@RG\tID:$name\tSM:$name\tPL:ILLUMINA" \
$ref_file \
fastq/$name.R1.fastq.gz \
fastq/$name.R2.fastq.gz \
-t 1 > bam/$name.sam;
samtools view -bh bam/$name.sam |\
samtools sort > bam/$name.sort.bam;
samtools index bam/$name.sort.bam
done < bam/samplelist.txt
After your final bam files are created, and you’ve checked that they look good, you should remove intermediate files to save space. You can build file removal into your bash scripts, but it is often helpful to only add that in once the script works. It’s hard to troubleshoot a failed script if it deletes everything as it goes.