sanity error in bowtie

[emmaggie]

Hi,

Has anyone encountered:
Sanity error: sizeof(char *) <= 4 but offsLen is 1a73e30c
when running Bowtie?

I've been using bowtie-build to build an index for an EST reference (a lot of fairly short sequences in comparison to normal genome assemblies) and had no problem with it (a character count gives ~53 million; the fasta file is ~900Mb, so it's far below the 4bln cutoff for bowtie-build).

But then, when I tried to run bowtie 0.12.8 using this index I get the following error:
Sanity error: sizeof(char *) <= 4 but offsLen is 1a73e30c

Is the size of the index a problem (8.5 Gb), the fact that the reference contains a lot of short sequences? or simply the computational power (I'm using a Mac with 2.26 Quad Core processor and 6GB RAM). Or something completely different?


Could you point me in a direction where to even start to troubleshoot?
Thank you!

[emmaggie]

For all interested, it was indeed index size issue. I've increased the value for --offrate, which brought the index size down and bowtie did run. Have not analyzed the output yet so if there is a problem, I will post an update.