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  • Introducing FilterByTile: Remove Low-Quality Reads Without Adding Bias

    I'd like to introduce a new member of the BBMap package, FilterByTile. It's intended to increase the quality of libraries without incurring bias, or to help salvage libraries with major positional quality problems (like flow-cell bubbles).


    *Overview*

    The quality of Illumina reads is dependent on location in a flowcell. Some areas are in poor optical focus, or have weaker circulation, or air bubbles, can have very low-quality reads that nonetheless pass Illumina’s filter criteria. While these reads usually have below-average quality scores, it requires very aggressive quality-filtering to remove all of the reads with positionally-related low quality. Aggressive quality filtering and trimming can, in turn, cause detrimental impacts on analysis because sequence quality is also sequence-dependent; thus, aggressive filtering can incur bias against extreme-GC portions of the genome, or specific motifs. This may yield poor assemblies, incorrect ploidy calls, bad expression quantification, and similar problems.

    FilterByTile is designed to filter low-quality reads based on positional information. By removing only a small fraction of reads - those in the lowest-quality areas of the flowcell – the overall quality of the data can be increased without incurring sequence-specific bias. The default settings of FilterByTile typically remove on the order of 2% of the reads, while reducing the overall error rate by substantially more than 2% (on the order of 10%). Essentially, it gets rid of the worst of the worst.

    FilterByTile was originally developed after observing spikes in the kmer-uniqueness plot used to calculate library complexity, in what should have been a monotonically-declining exponential decay curve (generated by bbcalcunique.sh); these spikes corresponded to low-quality locations on the flow-cell. Interestingly, the spikes often have a regular period, indicating a structured pattern such as flow-cell edges, tile edges, or a “streak”. The initial goal of FilterByTile was simply to eliminate these spikes to allow better estimation of library size and complexity, but it can be useful for generally improving library quality as well.


    *Notes*

    How it works:

    Illumina read names contain information about each cluster’s lane, tile, and X,Y coordinates. FilterByTile scans all reads in the file and calculates the average quality score for a given position. Additionally, the average kmer-uniqueness rate is calculated by position; for data with sufficient depth, this can be used as a proxy for error-rate, allowing filtering of data with inaccurate quality scores.

    To calculate a useful average quality for a position, sufficient reads are needed. So, reads are aggregated by position into rectangular “micro-tiles”; these micro-tiles are iteratively expanded until the average micro-tile contains at least X reads (default 800). Then, the averages are calculated on a per-micro-tile bases, standard deviations are calculated, and for tiles at least Y standard deviations worse than normal, all reads are discarded together. Thus, smaller micro-tiles allow more precise positional filtering, but larger micro-tiles yield more accurate quality-score averages. Arbitrary shapes such as circles outlining bubbles would be optimal, but there are no plans for this.

    How and when to use, or not:

    FilterByTile is applicable to any Illumina HiSeq, MiSeq, or NextSeq sequence. Howevver, it depends on large volumes of data for statistics; it’s useless to run it on a set of 4000 reads demultiplexed from a much larger run. In that case, it would be better to use the “dump” flag to dump the statistics from all libraries in the run together, then use the “indump” flag to filter the libraries individually. That way, quality statistics gathered from all reads will be applied to each individual library.

    The filtering should be beneficial in most cases - particularly when you want to salvage a library that obviously had bubbles or low-flow streaks in the lane, but also for libraries with no dramatic positional quality issues. However, there are some cases – such as complex metagenomes - in which more coverage is strictly beneficial, so throwing away even low-quality reads is a bad idea. In these cases, or any situation where very low coverage is expected, filtering will often lead to inferior results. With high coverage, FilterByTile should be strictly beneficial.

    Read names:

    FilterByTile depends on read headers to identify flowcell location. It has been validated with HiSeq, MiSeq, and NextSeq data, but different Illumina demultiplexing/base-calling software versions have different naming conventions, so please contact me if you see Illumina names that it can’t parse. Renamed reads (such as those in the SRA) probably won’t work.

    Memory:

    FilterByTile should not need too much memory, but if it runs out of memory it will generally be due to calculating kmer uniqueness for a large genome. In this case, the “usekmers=f” flag will ignore kmers and just use quality scores; in that case, it won’t run out of memory.


    *Usage Examples*

    Single-ended or paired/interleaved files:
    Code:
    filterbytile.sh in=reads.fq.gz out=filtered.fq.gz
    Paired reads in twin files:
    Code:
    filterbytile.sh in1=r1.fq in2=r2.fq out1=filtered1.fq out2=filtered2.fq

    Filtering using a statistical profile from multiple libraries:
    Code:
    cat *.fastq.gz > all.fq.gz
    filterbytile.sh in=all.fq.gz dump=dump.flowcell
    filterbytile.sh in=sample1.fastq.gz out=filtered_sample1.fq.gz indump=dump.flowcell

    Filtering aggressively (when you know there’s a serious problem):
    Code:
    filterbytile.sh in=x.fq out=y.fq ud=0.75 qd=1 ed=1 ua=.5 qa=.5 ea=.5

    Disabling kmer uniqueness to increase speed and decrease memory usage:
    Code:
    filterbytile.sh in=x.fq out=y.fq usekmers=f

  • #2
    @Brian: Can this be easily extended to provide "MarkDuplicates" functionality? Currently only Piacard tools does this.

    I am referring to optical duplicates that form due to "pad hopping" in case of patterned HiSeq 4000 flowcells. Since you are using smaller rectangular tiles to look at reads in the neighborhood would it be possible to identify clusters that may be optical dups and mark them?
    Last edited by GenoMax; 12-23-2016, 02:11 PM.

    Comment


    • #3
      Originally posted by GenoMax View Post
      @Brian: Can this be easily extended to provide "MarkDuplicates" functionality? Currently only Picard tools does this.

      I am referring to optical duplicates that form due to "pad hopping" in case of patterned HiSeq 4000 flowcells. Since you are using smaller rectangular tiles to look at reads in the neighborhood would it be possible to identify clusters that may be optical dups and mark them?
      It sounds like it might (or could) be a straightforward extension, yes. Could require writing temp files if all reads don't fit into memory, though. I'd have to study the optical duplicate problem in detail first because I don't currently know how to identify them confidently.

      Comment


      • #4
        If you can look in the positional neighborhood for clusters having identical sequence then those would be it.

        Comment


        • #5
          GenoMax, my first thought was also that an optical dup filter was needed! I would love to remove optical duplicates as a first step in a pipeline (before mapping). Seems like between clumpify and this filterbytile he almost has it written already. (Sorry Brian, I'm sure it is annoying for us to besiege you with requests and then add how it should be easy to do.)
          Providing nextRAD genotyping and PacBio sequencing services. http://snpsaurus.com

          Comment


          • #6
            I decided it would work best to add deduplication features to Clumpify. All approaches work perfectly for error-free reads, but Clumpify is affected slightly more by errors than mapping-based approaches, for situations when it is desirable to remove "duplicates" with mismatches. Here's a comparison showing Clumpify's paired read deduplication compared to DedupeByMapping on some real HiSeq data, allow reads with various number of mismatches to the reference (DedupeByMapping is considered the gold standard in each case, though that does not necessarily mean it is more correct). Clumpify is run with different settings (C and D have higher removal rates because they use 3 passes; A is at default settings).



            I also added in the ability to restrict duplicate removal to only clusters within a specific number pixels of each other on the flowcell, to avoid removal of PCR duplicates or coincidental duplicates due to high coverage. In so doing I noticed some interesting things... firstly, that most optical duplicates are on different tiles (inter-tile duplicates) rather than the same tile, and secondly, that in the data I tested, NextSeq has a WAY higher optical duplicate rate (~1%) than HiSeq 2500/1T (0.05%). The way you can distinguish between an inter-tile optical duplicate and a PCR duplicate is that inter-tile optical duplicates will share an X or Y coordinate (within some number of pixels, typically under 40). Intra-tile optical duplicates will of course share both coordinates as well as the tile number.

            I'll release this once I'm done testing.
            Attached Files

            Comment


            • #7
              Am I reading the graph above correctly in that you were not able to find true optical dups (perfect matches on the read) in data you tested? These should be present in problematic HiSeq 3K, 4K data.

              You may also want to grab some HiSeq 4000 (or HiSeq X) data from SRA to test since we expect this to be a problem there.

              Comment


              • #8
                Hi Genomax,

                There were plenty of identical pairs. Everything is scaled to 100% in that graph, but here is the raw data:

                Code:
                	A	B	C	D	DBM
                0	3868	3868	3868	3868	3870
                1	6260	6316	6402	6454	6470
                2	6534	6562	6720	6728	6746
                3	6590	6628	6794	6806	6826
                4	6622	6662	6832	6840	6858
                5	6652	6690	6864	6874	6888
                56% of the optical duplicates are perfectly identical, and those were found without problems. Only the reads with mismatches to each other pose challenges, but most of those were still found as well. I still consider them optical duplicates even though they are not technically identical. I've been kind of struggling with the definition of "optical duplicates", but I will use this:

                Code:
                Reads originating from the same fragment, called multiple times despite originating from nearly the same physical flowcell location.
                Since they reads are called multiple times, they can have different errors despite being the same physical cluster.
                Last edited by Brian Bushnell; 12-29-2016, 03:48 PM.

                Comment


                • #9
                  OK, the new version of Clumpify is out, adding the "dedupe" and "optical" flags (as well as a few other related flags), so you can do optical or full deduplication. Also related to FilterByTile, BBDuk now has xmin, ymin, xmax, and ymax flags for large-scale location-based read filtering; essentially, you can eliminate tile-edge effects using a bounding box. For our NextSeq I was able to eliminate tile-edge duplicates with "xmin=1600 xmax=26300". There did not seem to be any on the Y edges. But, the exact values may vary by machine or run.
                  Last edited by Brian Bushnell; 01-04-2017, 03:11 PM.

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    Brian et al., would you recommend filterbytile.sh be done first, before adapter trimming & quality filtering?
                    Thanks,
                    MC

                    Comment


                    • #11
                      Hi MC,

                      FilterByTile should be run on raw data, before anything else that changes or removes any reads. If you do any quality-related filtering or trimming steps before FilterByTile, you will remove some of the lowest-quality reads, which will disrupt the statistics.

                      Comment


                      • #12
                        Hello Brian,
                        I get the message "Warning: Zero reads processed." using indump=dump.flowcell. But it looks like making the dump file worked ok (it says it processed 780m reads). Is it safe to ignore this warning?

                        Thanks,
                        mcmc

                        Comment


                        • #13
                          Yeah, sorry about that, it's a known bug when you are using already-created flowcell files. If you do everything in a single pass it won't print that. Do you mind posting the filtering statistics, platform, and read length, just out of curiosity? The defaults generally remove around 2-5% of the reads in my testing, but I've only tested it on HiSeq 2500 and NextSeq data.

                          Comment


                          • #14
                            Thanks. This was HiSeq 2500 2x250 RapidRun (with both lanes concatenated, which I assume is ok, since you refer to "flowcell" and not "lane"). I used the entire dataset (15 metagenomes) to calc the stats, then used dump.flowcell to filter each sample. Here is one example:

                            Code:
                            Flagged 36407 of 519552 micro-tiles, containing 50578608 reads:
                            0 exceeded uniqueness thresholds.
                            30332 exceeded quality thresholds.
                            34084 exceeded error-free probability thresholds.
                            0 had too few reads to calculate statistics.
                            
                            Filtering reads:        988.159 seconds.
                            
                            Time:                           988.671 seconds.
                            
                            Reads Processed:      56900k    57.55k reads/sec
                            Bases Processed:      14225m    14.39m bases/sec
                            
                            Reads Discarded:       3094k    5.438%
                            Bases Discarded:        773m    5.438%
                            I used "lowqualityonly=t usekmers=f"
                            Last edited by mcmc; 02-11-2017, 05:01 PM.

                            Comment


                            • #15
                              Thanks! Yes, FilterByTile processes lanes independently, so you can use them all at once.

                              Comment

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