Andrea Telatin
Andrea Telatin Senior bioinformatician at the Quadram Institute Bioscience, Norwich.

Denoising with Deblur

Deblur is an alternative method to produce a set of denoised sequences. While DADA2 can natively support paired-end reads, Deblur can only manage single-end reads.

We can merge the paired end reads using VSEARCH, that is available as a Qiime2 plugin

Merge reads with VSEARCH

The complete documentation of the q2-vsearch plugin contains all the available parameters.

This subprogram merge the overlapping pairs to produce a set of single-end FASTQ file, and will work only when the amplicon are designed with the overlap.

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qiime vsearch join-pairs \
     --i-demultiplexed-seqs raw-reads.qza \
     --o-joined-sequences joined-reads.qza \
     --p-threads 8

Sequence quality control and feature table construction

This method filters sequence based on quality scores and the presence of ambiguous base calls.

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qiime quality-filter q-score \
      --i-demux joined-reads.qza \
      --o-filtered-sequences joined-filtered.qza \
      --o-filter-stats joined-filter-stats.qza

Denoising with deblur

Deblur requires to process a set of single end reads truncated at the same length (which now should be decided after)

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qiime deblur denoise-16S \
      --i-demultiplexed-seqs joined-filtered.qza \
      --p-trim-length 245 \
      --p-sample-stats \
      --p-jobs-to-start 32 \
      --o-stats deblur-stats.qza \
      --o-representative-sequences rep-seqs-deblur.qza \
      --o-table table-deblur.qza

As usual, we can produce visualization artifacts to summarize the content of:

  • representative sequences
  • denoising statistics
  • feature table
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qiime deblur visualize-stats \
       --i-deblur-stats deblur-stats.qza \
       --o-visualization deblur-stats.qzv

qiime feature-table tabulate-seqs \
       --i-data rep-seqs-deblur.qza \
       --o-visualization rep-seqs-deblur.qzv

qiime feature-table summarize \
       --i-table table-deblur.qza \
       --m-sample-metadata-file metadata.tsv \
       --o-visualization table-deblur.qzv