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Warning!

Puhti and Mahti computing services have been decommissioned and no new jobs are accepted or executed on its compute nodes. Puhti and Mahti login nodes and storage services are planned to remain available until 15 October 2026. Clean up unnecessary files and move any data you need to keep by 31 August 2026. See the Roihu data migration guide for instructions on transferring your data to Roihu.

TopHat

TopHat is a fast splice junction mapper for RNA-Seq reads. It aligns RNA-Seq reads to mammalian-sized genomes using the ultra high-throughput short read aligner Bowtie, and then analyzes the mapping results to identify splice junctions between exons.

License

Free to use and open source under Boost Software License 1.0.

Available

  • Roihu: 2.1.2, via the bio-apps module.

Usage

TopHat is part of the bio-apps collection on Roihu. Load the bio-apps module tree and then the TopHat module:

module load bio-apps/v202603
module load tophat/2.1.2

Tophat jobs should be run as batch jobs. Below is a sample batch job file for running a TopHat job on Roihu:

#!/bin/bash
#SBATCH --job-name=tophat
#SBATCH --account=<project>
#SBATCH --output=out_%j.txt
#SBATCH --error=err_%j.txt
#SBATCH --partition=small
#SBATCH --time=24:00:00
#SBATCH --nodes=1
#SBATCH --ntasks=1
#SBATCH --cpus-per-task=4
#SBATCH --mem=16G

module load bio-apps/v202603
module load tophat/2.1.2

tophat -p $SLURM_CPUS_PER_TASK -o tophat_results Homo.sapiens_bwt2_index reads1.fq reads2.fq 

In the batch job example above, one task (--ntasks=1) is executed. The job uses 4 cores (--cpus-per-task=4) with 16 GB of memory (--mem=16G). The maximum duration of the job is 24 hours (--time=24:00:00). Change --account to match your own project name.

Note that we also need to tell TopHat to use the number of cores we reserved. In Tophat, this is done with the -p command-line argument. We can use system variable $SLURM_CPUS_PER_TASK to automatically match the reservation made with --cpus-per-task. This way we don't need to change the command-line if we change the reservation.

See creating a batch job script for Roihu for more information about running batch jobs.

Support

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