Introduction

fqtools is a software suite for fast processing of FASTQ files. Various file manipulations are supported. See below for a full list of the subcommands available and a brief description of their purpose. Most of the individual subcommands will take either a single file or a pair of files as input. If no input file is specified, fqtools will attempt to read data from stdin. In this case, it is advisabe to specify the format of the data provided. For subcommands that generate FASTQ data, either a single file or a pair of files will be generated. If no -o argument is provided, single files will be writted to stdout.

Citation

If you use fqtools in pblished work, please can you include a reference to my Bioinformatics paper:

• Droop, A. P. (2016). fqtools: An efficient software suite for modern FASTQ file manipulation. Bioinformatics (Oxford, England). [**DOI**:10.1093/bioinformatics/btw088]

Installation

fqtools requires building against both the zlib and htslib libraries:

• zlib is required for processing compressed (.gz) data. The code relies on several recent zlib file IO functions, so must be a version >= 1.2.3.5.
• htslib is required for reading BAM files. If htslib is not installed, download and compile htslib. Then, alter the HTSDIR path in the fqtools Makefile to point to the htslib source directory.

If ZLib is already installed, building can be performed similar to the following:

git clone https://github.com/alastair-droop/fqtools
cd fqtools/
git clone https://github.com/samtools/htslib
cd htslib/
autoheader
autoconf 
./configure
make
make install
cd ..
make

You might need to run the make install as sudo make install. The htslib library must be installed into a location that the built fqtools program can find (as fqtools executable is dynamically linked to the htslib library). So, if you can not (or do not want to) install HTSlib, you must add the location of the libhts.so file to your LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable.

Licence

fqtools is released under the GNU General Public License version 3.

Subcommands

The fqtools suite contains the following subcommands:

• view View FASTQ files
• head View the first reads in FASTQ files
• count Count FASTQ file reads
• header View FASTQ file header data
• sequence View FASTQ file sequence data
• quality View FASTQ file quality data
• header2 View FASTQ file secondary header data
• fasta Convert FASTQ files to FASTA format
• basetab Tabulate FASTQ base frequencies
• qualtab Tabulate FASTQ quality character frequencies
• type Attempt to guess the FASTQ quality encoding type
• validate Validate FASTQ files
• find Find FASTQ reads containing specific sequences
• trim Trim reads in a FASTQ file
• qualmap Translate quality values using a mapping file

Each subcommand has its own set of arguments. The global arguments are:

• -h Show this help message and exit.
• -v Show the program version and exit.
• -d Allow DNA sequence bases (ACGTN)
• -r Allow RNA sequence bases (ACGUN)
• -a Allow ambiguous sequence bases (RYKMSWBDHV)
• -m Allow mask sequence base (X)
• -u Allow uppercase sequence bases
• -l Allow lowercase sequence bases
• -p CHR Set the pair replacement character (default “%”)
• -b BUFSIZE Set the input buffer size
• -B BUFSIZE Set the output buffer size
• -q QUALTYPE Set the quality score encoding
• -f FORMAT Set the input file format
• -F FORMAT Set the output file format
• -i Read interleaved input file pairs
• -I Write interleaved output file pairs

CHR

This character will be replaced by the pair value when writing paired files.

BUFSIZE

Possible suffixes are [bkMG]. If no suffix is given, value is in bytes.

QUALTYPE

• u Do not assume specifc quality score encoding
• s Interpret quality scores as Sanger encoded
• o Interpret quality scores as Solexa encoded
• i Interpret quality scores as Illumina encoded

FORMAT

• F uncompressed FASTQ format (.fastq)
• f compressed FASTQ format (.fastq.gz)
• b unaligned BAM format (.bam)
• u attempt to infer format from file extension, (default .fastq.gz)