Read quality filtering and trimming

The following example shows how one can design a custom read preprocessing function using utilities provided by the ShortRead package, and then apply it with preprocessReads in batch mode to all FASTQ samples referenced in the corresponding SYSargs instance (args object below). More detailed information on read preprocessing is provided in systemPipeR's main vignette.

args <- systemArgs(sysma="param/trim.param", mytargets="targets_chip.txt")
filterFct <- function(fq, cutoff=20, Nexceptions=0) {
    qcount <- rowSums(as(quality(fq), "matrix") <= cutoff)
    fq[qcount <= Nexceptions] # Retains reads where Phred scores are >= cutoff with N exceptions
}
preprocessReads(args=args, Fct="filterFct(fq, cutoff=20, Nexceptions=0)", batchsize=100000)
writeTargetsout(x=args, file="targets_chip_trim.txt", overwrite=TRUE)

FASTQ quality report

The following seeFastq and seeFastqPlot functions generate and plot a series of useful quality statistics for a set of FASTQ files including per cycle quality box plots, base proportions, base-level quality trends, relative k-mer diversity, length and occurrence distribution of reads, number of reads above quality cutoffs and mean quality distribution. The results are written to a PDF file named fastqReport.pdf.

args <- systemArgs(sysma="param/tophat.param", mytargets="targets_chip.txt")
fqlist <- seeFastq(fastq=infile1(args), batchsize=100000, klength=8)
pdf("./results/fastqReport.pdf", height=18, width=4*length(fqlist))
seeFastqPlot(fqlist)
dev.off()

Figure 1: FASTQ quality report for 18 samples
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