Overview
As mentioned in the introduction tutorial as well as the read processing tutorial, read processing can make a huge impact on downstream work. While cutadapt which was introduced in the read processing tutorial is great for quick evaluation or dealing with a single bad sample, it is not as robust as some other trimmers in particular when it comes to removing sequence that you know shouldn't be present but may exist in odd orientations (such as adapter sequences from the library preparation).
Learning objectives:
Install trimmomatic
Set up a small script to work around the annoying java invocation
Remove adapter sequences from some plasmids and evaluate effect on read quality, or assembly.
Installing trimmomatic
Trimmomatic's home page can be found at this link which includes links to the paper discussing the program, and a user manual. Trimmomatic is far above average for as far as programs go, most will not have a user manual, may not have been updated since originally published, etc. This is what makes it such a good tool.
Checking for installation
Installing using wget
In a new web browser window/tab, navigate to the trimmomatic home page. In the Downloading Trimmomatic section; right click on the 'binary' link for version 0.39 and copy that link address.
Which to choose binary files or uncompiled source code
Use the wget command to download the link you just copied to a new folder named src in your $WORK directory.
If you already have a src directory, you'll get a very benign error message stating that the folder already exists and thus can not be created.
You should see a download bar showing you the file has begun downloading, when complete the ls
command will show you a new compressed file named "Trimmomatic-0.39.zip". Next we need to uncompress this file, and copy the executable file to a location already in our $PATH variable.
unzip Trimmomatic-0.39.zip cd Trimmomatic-0.39 cp trimmomatic-0.39.jar $HOME/local/bin
If you don't see the zip file or are unable to cd into the 0.39 directory after unzipping it let the instructor know.