Introduction Usage Parameters Output Results Releases

Introduction

This document describes the output produced by the pipeline. Most of the plots are taken from the MultiQC report, which summarises results at the end of the pipeline.

The directories listed below will be created in the results directory after the pipeline has finished. All paths are relative to the top-level results directory.

Pipeline overview

The pipeline is built using Nextflow and processes data using the following steps:

  • bcl-convert - converting bcl files to fastq, and demultiplexing (CONDITIONAL)
  • bases2fastq - converting bases files to fastq, and demultiplexing (CONDITIONAL)
  • bcl2fastq - converting bcl files to fastq, and demultiplexing (CONDITIONAL)
  • fastp - Adapter and quality trimming
  • FastQC - Raw read QC
  • md5sum - Creates an MD5 (128-bit) checksum of every fastq.
  • MultiQC - aggregate report, describing results of the whole pipeline

bcl-convert

bcl-convert Conversion Software both demultiplexes data and converts BCL files generated by Illumina sequencing systems to standard FASTQ file formats for downstream analysis.

Output files
  • samplename/sample.fastq.gz
    • Untrimmed raw fastq files

bases2fastq

bases2fastq demultiplexes sequencing data and converts base calls generated by the Element AVITI™ System into FASTQ files for secondary analysis with FASTQ-compatible software.

Output files
FileDirectoryDescription
bases2fastq.loginfoLog file that records software events
HTML QC reportRootInteractive report on run performance and quality
FASTQSamples/{sample}The primary output of Bases2Fastq
Metrics.csvRootStatistics for each lane: mismatch rates, percent assigned, and per-sample yield
RunManifest.csvRootThe AOS- or user-created run manifest
RunManifestErrors.jsoninfoA record of errors in the run manifest
RunParameters.jsonRootA copy of the original run parameters file
RunStats.jsonRootInformation on run performance
Sample statisticsSamples/{sample}Information on the performance of each sample in the run
UnassignedSequences.csvRootThe most frequent unassigned index sequences with approximate counts*

bcl2fastq

fastp

Output files
  • <flowcell_id>/
    • *.fastp.html: Trimming report in html format.
    • *.fastp.json: Trimming report in json format.
    • *.fastp.log: Trimming log file.

fastp is a tool designed to provide fast, all-in-one preprocessing for FastQ files. It has been developed in C++ with multithreading support to achieve higher performance. fastp is used in this pipeline for standard adapter trimming and quality filtering.

MultiQC - fastp filtered reads plot

FastQC

Output files
  • <flowcell_id>/
    • *_fastqc.html: FastQC report containing quality metrics.
    • *_fastqc.zip: Zip archive containing the FastQC report, tab-delimited data file and plot images.

NB: The FastQC plots in this directory are generated relative to the raw, input reads. They may contain adapter sequence and regions of low quality. To see how your reads look after adapter and quality trimming please refer to the FastQC reports in the trimgalore/fastqc/ directory.

FastQC gives general quality metrics about your sequenced reads. It provides information about the quality score distribution across your reads, per base sequence content (%A/T/G/C), adapter contamination and overrepresented sequences. For further reading and documentation see the FastQC help pages.

MultiQC - FastQC sequence counts plot

MultiQC - FastQC mean quality scores plot

MultiQC - FastQC adapter content plot

md5sum

Output files
  • <flowcell_id>/
    • *.fastq.gz.md5: MD5 checksum of fastq

Creates an MD5 (128-bit) checksum of every fastq.

MultiQC

Output files
  • multiqc/
    • multiqc_report.html: a standalone HTML file that can be viewed in your web browser.
    • multiqc_data/: directory containing parsed statistics from the different tools used in the pipeline.
    • multiqc_plots/: directory containing static images from the report in various formats.

MultiQC is a visualization tool that generates a single HTML report summarising all samples in your project. Most of the pipeline QC results are visualised in the report and further statistics are available in the report data directory.

Results generated by MultiQC collate pipeline QC from supported tools e.g. FastQC. The pipeline has special steps which also allow the software versions to be reported in the MultiQC output for future traceability. For more information about how to use MultiQC reports, see http://multiqc.info.

Pipeline information

Output files
  • pipeline_info/
    • Reports generated by Nextflow: execution_report.html, execution_timeline.html, execution_trace.txt and pipeline_dag.dot/pipeline_dag.svg.
    • Reports generated by the pipeline: pipeline_report.html, pipeline_report.txt and software_versions.yml. The pipeline_report* files will only be present if the --email / --email_on_fail parameter’s are used when running the pipeline.
    • Reformatted samplesheet files used as input to the pipeline: samplesheet.valid.csv.

Nextflow provides excellent functionality for generating various reports relevant to the running and execution of the pipeline. This will allow you to troubleshoot errors with the running of the pipeline, and also provide you with other information such as launch commands, run times and resource usage.