Can You Please Tell Me Where I Find Information About .Fai File Format?
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7
Entering edit mode
14.3 years ago
Biomed 5.0k

I am playing with GATK but the web site states fai as the ref file format however I have access to reference alignments as maf files. Can you help me with this?

maf gatk • 26k views
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14
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11.7 years ago

Purely for my future self if I google this again, the columns of a .fai file appear to be:

  • chromosome name
  • chromosome length
  • offset of the first base of the chromosome sequence in the file
  • length of the fasta lines
  • some other length of the fasta lines called "line_blen" in the source code? Appears to typically (for me) be length of fasta line + 1.

ETA: Oh, Pierre already answered this over here. blen is number of bytes in each fasta line.

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12
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14.3 years ago
brentp 24k

that is an index of your fasta file. have a look at samtools:

Once installed, you can create an index of some.fasta as

samtools faidx some.fasta

this will create some.fasta.fai

and have a look here where it describes how to set up your data for GATK.

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0
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Is there a way to do this with picard or GATK itself? I'd love to stay away from samtools if I could.

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7
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14.3 years ago

The FAIDX file is created by samtools faidx. The FAIDX file contains, among other things, the

  • name of the reference sequence (chr1, chr2...)
  • the offset of the first base of this sequence in the file
  • the length of the FASTA lines

with this information, samtools can quickly access any region of the genome.

See also this post I wrote about faidx

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0
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Dear Pierre,

So if I understand right - if I need bed file from my fa.fai I can do just

awk 'OFS="\t" {print $1,$3,$2}' in.fai

? Thank you so much.

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2
Entering edit mode
5.2 years ago

HTSlib has provided a manual page describing this format for a few years now. See man 5 faidx, also on the web at faidx(5) manual page.

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