Struggling with quality trimming

[Alex852013]

Hello everybody,

this is my first try to trim Illumina (paired-end) reads on the unix command line.
If i get it correctly, de-multiplexing was already done by the sequencing service.
I guess this also means that the adapters are also gone already.

What i want to do is trimming the reads by quality.
I checked it on FastQC and want to get rid of read with a quality below 20.

I tried trim_galore with
trim_galore ../name1.fastq -q 20 --paired > trim_name.fastq

which gives me:
"No quality encoding type selected. Assuming that the data provided uses Sanger encoded Phred scores (default)
Please provide an even number of input files for paired-end FastQ trimming! Aborting ..." <- i got the idea of this line

But i don't really know how to find out how my data are encoded.
The data look like this.

@NS500339:99:H3H52AFXX:1:11101:5599:1027 2:N:0:GTGAAA
NNNCTGGTTATAGGTACATTGAGCAACTGACTGAAATGCCTCAAAATGTTCTTTACGATGCCATTGGGATATATCAACGGTGGTATATCCAGTGATTTTTTTCTCCATTTTAGCTTCCTTAGCTCCTGAAAATCTCGANANCTCNNAAAA
+
###/AEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAEEEEEEAEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE<6/<EEEEEEEEAAE6EEE/EEEEEEEEEEEAAEEEEE/6EE<AEEEEAEA<EEE/EEE/AAAE#<#<A/##/<<6


I also tried fastx toolbox with the following command
fastq_quality_filter -q 20 -i ../name.fastq -v -o trimmed_name.fastq

The program works,
Minimum percentage: 0
Input: 4564772 reads.
Output: 4564772 reads.
discarded 0 (0%) low-quality reads.

but if i check it again with FastQC, there are still reads with a quality below 20.


Maybe someone can please help me with one of the programs.

Thanks a lot, Alex

[GenoMax]

Grab a copy of BBMap and then run

$ zcat yourfile.fastq.gz | head -20 > new.fq
$ testformat.sh in=new.fq

to identify the format of the encoding in your file.

While you have a copy of BBMap handy, use bbduk.sh to do trimming.

$ bbduk.sh -Xmx1g in=reads.fq.gz out=clean.fq.gz qtrim=r trimq=10

[Alex852013]

Thanks

Thanks a lot, if now the following mapping step also works, this will be the solution

[GenoMax]

You could stay with BBMap and use bbmap.sh to do the mapping as well.