Do you need a deduplication tool for FASTQ data in fastp?

Forum: Do you need a deduplication tool for FASTQ data in fastp?

5 months ago by

chen • 1.9k

OpenGene

chen • 1.9k wrote:

Hi, I am the author of fastp, a tool to provide ultra-fast all-in-one FASTQ preprocessing functions.

This tool has received 500+ stars in github (https://github.com/OpenGene/fastp), and has been cited for 40+ times since its paper published in Bioinformatics about 8 months ago.

Now I am considering to add a deduplication function to it. This may require some effort to implement it. So I think I should ask the users here, whether people need this feature.

You replies will be very appreciated. I will continue to improve this tool.

deduplication fastp forum • 435 views

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modified 5 months ago by Istvan Albert ♦♦ 81k • written 5 months ago by chen • 1.9k

Hi chen, I changed the format to Forum and bumped the post back to the top. Hope you get decent responses.

ADD REPLY • link written 5 months ago by ATpoint ♦ 26k

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).

ADD REPLY • link modified 5 months ago • written 5 months ago by genomax ♦ 74k

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.

ADD REPLY • link written 5 months ago by chen • 1.9k

5 months ago by

Istvan Albert ♦♦ 81k

University Park, USA

Istvan Albert ♦♦ 81k wrote:

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.

ADD COMMENT • link written 5 months ago by Istvan Albert ♦♦ 81k

Thanks for your advice.

ADD REPLY • link written 5 months ago by chen • 1.9k

5 months ago by

Devon Ryan ♦ 92k

Freiburg, Germany

Devon Ryan ♦ 92k wrote:

If you're going to implement something along those lines, model it after clumpify from bbmap, wherein optical duplicates are what are marked and the distance between clusters for calling duplicates is user modifiable. Marking optical duplicates is one of the few instances where duplicates should be marked directly on fastq files. As an aside, clumpify usually works very well and very quickly. There are a few cases (usually when the rate of optical duplication is quite high) that it uses hundreds of GB of RAM and eventually crashes. If you can come up with something that has similar performance (in terms of time) but has lower worst-case memory requirements then that'd be awesome.

ADD COMMENT • link written 5 months ago by Devon Ryan ♦ 92k

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