RNA-seq: mapping to a reference genome with BWA and counting with HTSeq

The goal of this tutorial is to show you one of the ways to map RNASeq reads to a transcriptome and to produce a file with counts of mapped reads for each gene. This is an alternative approach to mapping to the reference genome, and by using the same dataset as the previous lesson (see drosophila_rnaseq1, we can see the differences between the two approaches.

We will again be using BWA for the mapping (previously used in the variant calling example) and HTSeq for the counting.

Booting an Amazon AMI

Start up an Amazon computer (m1.large or m1.xlarge) using AMI ami-7607d01e (see Start up an EC2 instance and Starting up a custom operating system.

Go back to the Amazon Console.

  • Select “snapshots” from the left side column.
  • Changed “Owned by me” drop down at the top to “All Snapshots”
  • Search for “snap-028418ad” - (This is a snapshot with our test RNASeq Drosophila data from Chris) The description should be “Drosophila RNA-seq data”.
  • Under “Actions” select “Create Volume”, then ok.

Make sure to create your EC2 instance and your EBS volume in the same availability zone, for this course we are using N. Virginia.

  • Select “Volumes” from the left side column
  • You should see an “in-use” volume - this is for your running instance. You will also see an “available” volume - this is the one you just created from the snapshot from Chris and should have the snap-028418ad label. Select the available volume
  • From the drop down select “Attach Volume”.
  • A white box pop up will appear - click in the empty instance box, your running instance should appear as an option. Select it.
  • For the device, enter /dev/sdf.
  • Attach.

Log in with Windows or from Mac OS X.

Updating the operating system

Become root:

sudo bash

Copy and paste the following two commands to update the computer with all the bundled software you’ll need.

apt-get update
apt-get -y install screen git curl gcc make g++ python-dev unzip \
        pkg-config libncurses5-dev r-base-core \
        r-cran-gplots python-matplotlib sysstat git python-pip
pip install pysam

Mount the data volume. (This is the volume we created earlier from Chris’s snapshot - this is where our data will be found):

cd /root
mkdir /mnt/ebs
mount /dev/xvdf /mnt/ebs

Install software

First, we need to install the BWA aligner

cd /root
wget -O bwa-0.7.10.tar.bz2 http://sourceforge.net/projects/bio-bwa/files/bwa-0.7.10.tar.bz2/download
tar xvfj bwa-0.7.10.tar.bz2
cd bwa-0.7.10
make
cp bwa /usr/local/bin

We also need a new version of samtools:

cd /root
curl -O -L http://sourceforge.net/projects/samtools/files/samtools/0.1.19/samtools-0.1.19.tar.bz2
tar xvfj samtools-0.1.19.tar.bz2
cd samtools-0.1.19
make
cp samtools /usr/local/bin
cp bcftools/bcftools /usr/local/bin
cd misc/
cp *.pl maq2sam-long maq2sam-short md5fa md5sum-lite wgsim /usr/local/bin/

Create a working directory to hold some more software that we’re going to install

cd /mnt/ebs
mkdir tools
cd tools

Download and install HTSeq

curl -O https://pypi.python.org/packages/source/H/HTSeq/HTSeq-0.6.1.tar.gz
tar -xzvf HTSeq-0.6.1.tar.gz
cd HTSeq-0.6.1/
python setup.py build
python setup.py install
chmod u+x ./scripts/htseq-count

We are also going to get a project, chado-test, from Scott Cain’s git hub account that will allow us to use a convenient file format conversion script.

cd /mnt/ebs/tools
git clone https://github.com/scottcain/chado_test.git

For that we will need bioperl installed

cpan

Answer yes until you get a prompt that looks like

cpan[1]>

And type

install Bio::Perl

When it asks “Do you want to run tests that require connection to servers across the internet”, answer no. The final line when finished should be:

./Build install  -- OK

Now exit the CPAN shell

exit

Preparing the reference

Next, we are going to work with our reference transcriptome. Drosophila has a reference genome, but for this adventure, we are going to pretend that it doesn’t. Instead we are going to use the Trinity assembly as our reference - Chris has provided this file, named Trinity_all_X.fasta. Notice the fasta format; each line beginning with a > is a new sequence, followed by another line (or multiple lines) containing the sequence itself. If we want to count how many transcripts are in the file, we can just count the number of lines that begin with >

cd /mnt/ebs/trinity_output
grep '>' Trinity_all_X.fasta | wc -l

You should see 8260. Now lets use bwa to index the file, this enables the file to be used a reference for mapping:

bwa index Trinity_all_X.fasta

To generate count files, we will use HTSeq. But HTSeq is expecting a genome annotation file, which we don’t have (since we’re using the transcriptome). So we have to do some data massaging. We will will create an annotation file that says that the entire length of each “scaffold” is in fact a coding region.

cd /mnt/ebs/rnaseq_mapping2
/mnt/ebs/tools/chado_test/chado/bin/gmod_fasta2gff3.pl \
--fasta_dir /mnt/ebs/trinity_output/Trinity_all_X.fasta \
--gfffilename Trinity_all_X.gff3 \
--type CDS \
--nosequence

Now you should have a file named Trinity_all_X.gff3 in your current directory.

Mapping

Lets check out the reads to be mapped

cd /mnt/ebs/drosophila_reads
ls -lh

Don’t forget that with your reads, you’ll want to take care of the usual QC steps before you actually begin your mapping. The drosophila_reads directory contains raw reads; the trimmed_x directory contains reads that have already been cleaned using Trimmomatic. We’ll use these for the remainder of the tutorial, but you may want to try running it with the raw reads for comparison.

We’ve got 12 sets of data, each with two files (R1 and R2). Let’s run bwa on the first pair to map our paired-end sequence reads to the transcriptome. To make our code a little more readable and flexible, we’ll use shell variables in place of the actual file names. In this case, let’s first specify what the values of those variables should be:

reference=/mnt/ebs/trinity_output/Trinity_all_X.fasta
sample=HYB_sdE3_rep1

Now we can use these variable names in our mapping commands. The advantage here is that we can just change the variables later on if we want to apply the same pipeline to a new set of samples:

cd /mnt/ebs
mkdir rnaseq_mapping2
cd rnaseq_mapping2
bwa mem ${reference} /mnt/ebs/trimmed_x/${sample}_1_pe /mnt/ebs/trimmed_x/${sample}_2_pe > ${sample}.sam

The output is a file named HYB_sdE3_rep1_2.sam in the current working directory. This file contains all of the information about where each read hits on the reference. Next, we want to use SAMTools to convert it to a BAM, and then sort and index it:

samtools view -Sb ${sample}.sam > ${sample}.unsorted.bam
samtools sort ${sample}.unsorted.bam ${sample}
samtools index ${sample}.bam

Now we can generate a counts file with the HTSeq-count script:

htseq-count --format=bam --stranded=no --type=CDS --order=pos --idattr=Name ${sample}.bam Trinity_all_X.gff3 > ${sample}_htseq_counts.txt

Optional - Script these steps

Since we have a lot of files to map, it would take a long time to re-write the mapping commands for each one. And with so many parameters, we might make a mistake or typo. It’s usually safer to use a simple shell script with shell variables to be sure that we do the exact same thing to each file. Using well-named shell variables also makes our code a little bit more readable. Open a file named map_and_count.sh and paste in the following code:

#Create an array to hold the names of all our samples
#Later, we can then cycle through each sample using a simple foor loop
samples[1]=ORE_wt_rep1
samples[2]=ORE_wt_rep2
samples[3]=ORE_sdE3_rep1
samples[4]=ORE_sdE3_rep2
samples[5]=SAM_wt_rep1
samples[6]=SAM_wt_rep2
samples[7]=SAM_sdE3_rep1
samples[8]=SAM_sdE3_rep2
samples[9]=HYB_wt_rep1
samples[10]=HYB_wt_rep2
samples[11]=HYB_sdE3_rep1
samples[12]=HYB_sdE3_rep2

#Create a shell variable to store the location of our reference genome
reference=/mnt/ebs/trinity_output/Trinity_all_X.fasta

#Make sure we are in the right directory
#Let's store all of our mapping results in /mnt/ebs/rnaseq_mapping2/ to make sure we stay organized
#If this directory already exists, thats ok, but files might get overwritten
cd /mnt/ebs
mkdir rnaseq_mapping2
cd rnaseq_mapping2

#Now we can actually do the mapping and counting
for i in 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
do
    sample=${samples[${i}]}
    #Map the reads
    bwa mem ${reference} /mnt/ebs/trimmed_x/${sample}_1_pe /mnt/ebs/trimmed_x/${sample}_2_pe  > ${sample}.sam
    samtools view -Sb ${sample}.sam > ${sample}.unsorted.bam
    samtools sort ${sample}.unsorted.bam ${sample}
    samtools index ${sample}.bam
    htseq-count --format=bam --stranded=no --type=CDS --order=pos --idattr=Name ${sample}.bam Trinity_all_X.gff3 > ${sample}_htseq_counts.txt
done

To run this script, change the permissions and run:

chmod u+x ./map_and_count.sh
./map_and_count.sh

We now have count files for each sample. Take a look at one of the count files using less. You’ll notice there are a lot of zeros, but that’s partially because we’ve already filtered the dataset for you to include only reads that map to the X chromosome.

You can also visualize these read mapping using tview Variant calling.


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