Trimmomatic

Rationale:

Trimmomatic trims adapters from the ends of sequencing reads, and optionally,  crops nucleotides from the ends of the trimmed reads based on quality or length criteria.

Where:

Run Trimmomatic in the same folder as your read files.

Input:

RNAseq reads
: Before opening this menu, select RNA-seq readfiles to be mapped to the genome. For paired-end reads, Trimmomatic works with pair of files. Files can be selected in pairs using File --> guesspairs.py.

Input read files may be gzipped or uncompressed.

Parameters:

Because of the large number of parameters for Trimmomatic, it is essential to consult the Trimmomatic User's Guide to make an informed decision as to how adapter clipping and/or cropping should be done.

Trimmomatic specifies a number of trimming steps:
These may be done in any order, but in most cases ILLUMINACLIP should be the first step. The blreads menu for Trimmomatic allows the user to turn steps on and off, and specify a rank, which tells the order in which the steps should be done.

By default, ILLUMINACLIP is turned on, and all other steps are turned off.

Parameters are found in four tabs of the Trimmomatic menu.
General - Parameters CPU usage, output and email notification
Clipadapt - Settings for the ILLUMINACLIP step.
Quality - Settings for trimming reads based on quality of bases
Cropping - Settings for cropping reads to a given length, or cropping nucleotides from the ends.
MINLEN - This parameter is included in the Cropping menu, but actually specifies the minimal length for final trimmed reads to be written to the output. If chosen, this step is done last, after all other steps.
Output:

Name for output directory -  This defaults to a directory in the parent directory. It is usually the best organizational practice for the paired and single read files to go somewhere other than the current directory.

Output files will be the names of the original fastq files. For each pair of paired end read files, the basename will be extended with _1P and _1U for paired and unpaired reads generated from the forward read file, and _2P and _2U for paired and unpaired reads generated from the reverse read file. Trimmed reads from single-end files will have _S added to the basename.

A new blreads window will be opened in the output directory.