21 months ago by
University Park, USA
I will say that de-duplication is a far more complex concept than what people/end users initially assume. Even interpreting the meaning of a deduplication plot is far from trivial - I had to give it two tries myself.
In the early times of sequencing the coverages were low, the sequencing process error-prone, tools were unable to cope with identical reads - and just about all duplicates were artificial. Today the coverages are much higher the occurrence of natural duplicates far more prevalent. SNP calling tools can recognize and deal with artificial duplicates from the data itself. Thus need to deduplicate reads is less critical.
That being said if you can write a fast and efficient read deduplicator, there is most certainly room for that. Especially if it would integrate with an existing toolset (fastp). The very fact that a new fastq processor can be successful after all these years demonstrates that there is always room for a well-written tool.
I will also concur with genomax that a read data simulator would also be something that would help a lot of people. Today the field is very fragmented, one needs a different tool for each target and the usages are clumsy.
chen : Can I make an unrelated suggestion?
If you are looking for a new programming challenge then consider creating a data simulator that can generate data with UMI's. Think about creating data for single cells, cell types, 10X etc. AFAIK there is nothing available that can do this now.
I concur with @Devon's point below but the nature of the data necessitates use of extreme amounts of RAM (I have used over TB for NovaSeq data with
clumpify
).Thanks, I will consider your suggestion.
For deduplication, I think I can control the RAM usage to be less than 16G for processing even 1Tbp Illumina PE data.
After 7 months how is the landscape? Is there a tool for extract UMIs and deduplication on FASTQ level? I have workflow and I need to have deduplication before mapping and BAM?
They've recently added a gencore repository, which might be able to do that. I haven't used this yet, I just remember merging in the bioconda recipes recently.
Update: I guess this takes BAM files, so it's not relevant.
manekineko : If you need de-duping before mapping your best bet is still: A: Introducing Clumpify: Create 30% Smaller, Faster Gzipped Fastq Files from BBMap suite.
Hi, can you tell me if fastp effectively remove duplicates or just count them?
Cheers.