BLASR(1)

BLASR(1) 💖 the read-mapping bestie we deserve

okay so. bestie. gather round. this is the blasr manual page, a User Commands situation, and I am obsessed with explaining it to you. no cap. 🦋

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✨ NAME ✨

blasr — Map SMRT Sequences to a reference genome

like. that's it. that's the whole job. map those SMRT sequences, queen. 👑

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🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

the vibe check, in code form:

blasr reads.bam genome.fasta --bam --out out.bam

blasr reads.fasta genome.fasta

blasr reads.fasta genome.fasta --sa genome.fasta.sa

blasr reads.bax.h5 genome.fasta [--sa genome.fasta.sa]

blasr reads.bax.h5 genome.fasta --sa genome.fasta.sa --maxScore 100
--minMatch 15 ...

blasr reads.bax.h5 genome.fasta --sa genome.fasta.sa --nproc 24 --out
alignment.out ...

notice the ... at the end of some of these? that's her saying "and I could go on, but you get the idea." main character energy fr fr. 💅

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

okay so here's the tea. blasr is a read mapping program. it maps reads to positions in a genome by clustering short exact matches between the read and the genome, and then it scores those clusters using alignment. how does it find the matches, you ask? it searches all suffixes of a read against the genome using a suffix array. and then — this part is iconic — global chaining methods are used to score clusters of matches. periodt. ✨

the only required inputs to blasr are a file of reads and a reference genome. that's the whole bare minimum. but listen — it is extremely useful to have read filtering information, and your mapping runtime may decrease substantially when a precomputed suffix array index on the reference sequence is specified. so like. do that. 😭

although reads may be input in FASTA format, the recommended input is PacBio BAM files, because these contain quality value information that is used in the alignment and produces higher quality variant detection. and yes, alignments can be output in various formats, but the recommended output format is PacBio BAM. 💖

⚠️ heads up bestie: support to bax.h5 and plx.h5 files will be DEPRECATED. support to region tables for h5 files will be DEPRECATED. she said what she said. 💀

when the suffix array index of a genome is not specified, the suffix array is built before producing alignment. and ngl, this may be prohibitively slow when the genome is large (e.g. Human). so it is best to precompute the suffix array of a genome using the program sawriter, and then specify the suffix array on the command line using -sa genome.fa.sa. do future-you a favor. 🫶

the optional parameters are roughly divided into three categories: control over anchoring, alignment scoring, and output. three little categories, all doing their thing. 🌈

the default anchoring parameters are optimal for small genomes and samples with up to 5% divergence from the reference genome. the main parameter governing speed and sensitivity is the -minMatch parameter. for human genome alignments, a value of 11 or higher is recommended. several methods may be used to speed up alignments, at the expense of possibly decreasing sensitivity — so like, speed is great but she's not free, iykyk. 💅

regions that are too repetitive may be ignored during mapping by limiting the number of positions a read maps to with the -maxAnchorsPerPosition option. values between 500 and 1000 are effective in the human genome. not me gatekeeping repetitive regions. 🙈

and for small genomes such as bacterial genomes or BACs? the default parameters are sufficient for maximal sensitivity and good speed. she just works. no notes. ⭐

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

this manpage was written by Andreas Tille for the Debian distribution and can be used for any other usage of the program. slay, Andreas. we appreciate you. 🎀

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and that's the whole page, bestie 💜 this was blasr version 5.3.2, dated January 2019, and honestly? iconic of her. go map something. 🧚✨