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BWA

Burrows-Wheeler Aligner (BWA) is an efficient program that aligns relatively short nucleotide sequences against a long reference sequence such as the human genome. It implements three algorithms, BWA-MEM (mem), BWA-Backtrack (aln) and BWA-SW (bwasw). BWA-Backtrack works for query sequences shorter than 200bp. The other two algorithms are used longer reads up to around 100kbp. BWA-MEM is recommend for reads longer than 70 gb. All algorithms do gapped alignment.

BWA can be used to align both single-end and paired end reads to a reference genome or sequence set.

License

Free to use and open source under GNU GPLv3.

Available

  • Puhti: 0.7.17
  • Chipster graphical user interface

Usage

In Puhti, BWA can be taken in use as part ofth the biokit module collection:

module load biokit

The biokit modules sets up a set of commonly used bioinformatics tools, including BWA. (Note however that there are bioinformatics tools in Puhti, that have a separate setup commands.)

The basic syntax of BWA commands is:

bwa <command> [options]

BWA indexes

CSC does not maintain pre-compiled BWA indexes for reference genomes in Puhti, but you can check if genomes used in Chipster can provide you a ready made index for a genome you want use. This can be done with command:

chipster_genomes bwa

If suitable genome index is not found the fist step in creating alignment with BWA is downloading the reference genome and indexing it. Please note that your $HOME directory is often too small for working with complete genomes. In stead you should do the analysis in scratch directory of your Puhti project ($SCRATCH).

You can use for example command ensemblfetch or wget to download a reference genome to Puhti. For example

ensemblfetch homo_sapiens

The command above retrieves the human genome sequence to a file called Homo_sapiens.GRCh38.dna.toplevel.fa. You can calculate the BWA indexes for this file with command: 

bwa index -a bwtsw Homo_sapiens.GRCh38.dna.toplevel.fa
Note that for small less than 2 GB reference genomes you could use faster, "is" indexing algorithm (bwa index -a is)

Single-end alignment

Once the indexing is ready you can carry out the alignment for singe-end reads with command: 

bwa mem Homo_sapiens.GRCh38.dna.toplevel.fa reads.fastq > aln.sam
If you wish to use the aln (BWA-Backtrack) algorithm you need to do the alignment in two steps.

First calculate the actual alignment: 

bwa aln Homo_sapiens.GRCh38.dna.toplevel.fa reads.fastq > aln_sa.sai
The result file is in BWA specific .sai format that you can convert to SAM format with bwa samse command: 
bwa samse Homo_sapiens.GRCh38.dna.toplevel.fa aln_sa.sai reads.fastq > aln.sam

Paired end alignment

If you use the MEM algorithm you can do the paired-end alignment with just one command: 

bwa mem Homo_sapiens.GRCh38.dna.toplevel.fa read1.fq read2.fq > aln.sam
In this case of BWA-Backtrack algorithm you should first do a separate alignment run for each read file: 
bwa aln Homo_sapiens.GRCh38.dna.toplevel.fa reads1.fq > aln1.sai

bwa aln Homo_sapiens.GRCh38.dna.toplevel.fa reads2.fq > aln2.sai
The two sai alignment files are combined with command bwa sampe: 
bwa sampe Homo_sapiens.GRCh38.dna.toplevel.fa aln1.sai aln2.sai reads1.fq reads2.fq > aln.sam

Running BWA batch jobs in Puhti

In Puhti, BWA jobs should be run as batch jobs. Below is a sample batch job file, for running a BWA job in Puhti: 

#!/bin/bash
#SBATCH --job-name=bwa
#SBATCH --output=output_%j.txt
#SBATCH --error=errors_%j.txt
#SBATCH --time=12:00:00
#SBATCH --ntasks=1
#SBATCH --nodes=1  
#SBATCH --cpus-per-task=8
#SBATCH --mem=32000
#SBATCH --account=your_project_name
#

#load the bio tools
module load biokit

# Index the reference genome
bwa index -a bwtsw Homo_sapiens.GRCh38.dna.toplevel.fa

# Run the alignnments
bwa mem -t $SLURM_CPUS_PER_TASK Homo_sapiens.GRCh38.dna.toplevel.fa reads1.fq reads2.fq > aln.sam

In the batch job example above one BWA task (--ntasks 1) is executed. The BWA job uses 8 cores (--cpus-per-task=8 ) with total of 32 GB of memory (--mem=32000). The maximum duration of the job is twelve hours (--time 12:00:00 ). All the cores are assigned from one computing node (--nodes=1 ). In addition to the resource reservations, you have to define the billing project for your batch job. This is done by replacing the your_project_name with the name of your project. (You can use command csc-workspaces to see what projects you have in Puhti).

You can submit the batch job file to the batch job system with command: 

sbatch batch_job_file.bash
See the Puhti user guide for more information about running batch jobs.

Manual

More information about BWA can be found from:

Last update: October 10, 2022