filterdup

Overview

The filterdup command is part of the MACS3 suite of tools and is used on alignment files to remove duplicate reads.

Detailed Description

The filterdup command takes an input alignment file and produces an output file in BED format with duplicate reads removed according to the setting. When the input is in BAMPE format (BAM file from aligning paired-end data), it will produce a BEDPE format file where each row represent a read-pair.

The filteredup command can also be used to convert any acceptable format of MACS3 to BED or BEDPE (in case of -f BAMPE) format, if you use --keep-dup all option.

Please note that, when writing BED format output for single-end dataset, MACS3 assume all the reads having the same length either from -s setting or from auto-detection.

Command Line Options

Here is a brief overview of the command line options:

  • -i or --ifile: The input alignment file. If multiple files are given as ‘-t A B C’, then they will all be read and pooled. REQUIRED.

  • -for --format: The format of the alignment file. Options include: “AUTO”, “BED” or “ELAND” or “ELANDMULTI” or “ELANDEXPORT” or “SAM” or “BAM” or “BOWTIE” or “BAMPE” or “BEDPE”. The default AUTO option will let filterdup decide which format the file is. Please check the callpeak for detail. Choices can be ELAND/ELANDMULTI/ELANDEXPORT/SAM/BAM/BOWTIE or BAMPE/BEDPE. DEFAULT: AUTO

  • -g or --gsize: Please check callpeak for detail. DEFAULT:hs

  • -s or --tsize: The tag size. This will override the auto detected tag size. DEFAULT: Not set

  • -p or --pvalue: The pvalue cutoff for binomial distribution test. DEFAULT:1e-5

  • --keep-dup: The number of duplicates to keep. It controls the ‘macs3 filterdup’ behavior towards duplicate tags/pairs at the exact same location – the same coordination and the same strand. If the value is auto, filterdup will calculate the maximum tags at the exact same location based on a binomal distribution using given -p as pvalue cutoff; and the all value will keep every tags (useful if you only want to convert formats). If an integer is given, at most this number of tags will be kept at the same location. Note, MACS3 callpeak function uses --keep-dup=1 as default. Note, if you’ve used samtools or picard to flag reads as ‘PCR/Optical duplicate’ in bit 1024, MACS3 will still read them although the reads may be decided by MACS3 as duplicate later. Default: auto

  • --buffer-size: The buffer size for incrementally increasing internal array size to store reads alignment information. In most cases, you don’t have to change this parameter. However, if there are large number of chromosomes/contigs/scaffolds in your alignment, it’s recommended to specify a smaller buffer size in order to decrease memory usage (but it will take longer time to read alignment files). Minimum memory requested for reading an alignment file is about # of CHROMOSOME * BUFFER_SIZE * 8 Bytes. DEFAULT: 100000

  • --verbose: The verbose level. 0: only show critical message, 1: show additional warning message, 2: show process information, 3: show debug messages. If you want to know where are the duplicate reads, use 3. DEFAULT:2

  • --outdir: If specified all output files will be written to that directory. Default: the current working directory

  • -o or --ofile: The output BED file name. If not specified, will write to standard output. Note, if the input format is BAMPE or BEDPE, the output will be in BEDPE format. DEFAULT: stdout

  • -d or --dry-run: When set, filterdup will only output numbers instead of writing output files, including maximum allowable duplicates, total number of reads before filtering, total number of reads after filtering, and redundant rate. Default: not set

Example Usage

Here is an example of how to use the filterdup command:

macs3 filterdup -i input.bam -o output.bed --gsize hs --format AUTO --keep-dup 1 --buffer-size 100000

In this example, the program will remove duplicate reads from the input.bam file and write the result to output.bed. The mappable genome size is set to hs (Homo Sapiens), the format of the input file is determined automatically, and the program keeps only one duplicate.

Here is an example to convert BAMPE file into BEDPE. Please note that -f BAMPE and --keep-dup all are both necessary for format conversion:

macs3 filterdup -i input.bam -o output.bedpe -f BAMPE --keep-dup all