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MetaPhlAn

MetaPhlAn is a computational tool for profiling the composition of microbial communities from metagenomic sequencing data.

License

Free to use and open source under MIT License.

Available

  • Puhti: 4.0.2, 4.0.3, 4.0.6

Usage

To activate MetaPhlAn Puhti, run command:

module load metaphlan

You can check vasic usage with command;

metaphlan --help

MetaPhlAn can automatically retrieve the MetaPhlAn database and create the Bowtie2 indexes it needs on-the-fly when it the command is executed. By default MetaPhlAn saves these index files to the MetaPhlAn installation directory, but in Puhti, this is not possible. Because of that, the users should use option --bowtie2db to define a directory that will be used to store the database and index files.

For example in the case of project_2001234 the user could first create a directory for the databases:

cd /scratch/project_2001234
mkdir metaphlan_databases

Databases can be also be pre-prepared with the --install option:

metaphlan --install --bowtie2db metaphlan_databases

The database is quite big and downloading and building it can take some time.

By default, the latest MetaPhlAn database is downloaded and built. You can download a specific version with the --index parameter.

metaphlan --install --index mpa_vJan21_CHOCOPhlAnSGB_202103 --bowtie2db metaphlan_databases

When running MetaPhlan analyses you must include the --bowtie2db option, and also --index if using non-default database. If database is not found in the indicated location, it will be automatically generated.

A test input dataset for testing MataPhlAn can be downloaded from the metaphlan github site:

wget https://github.com/biobakery/MetaPhlAn/releases/download/4.0.2/SRS014476-Supragingival_plaque.fasta.gz

In this example the job is executed as an interactive batch job.

sinteractive -m 16G -c 4
module load metaphlan
metaphlan --nproc 4 --bowtie2db metaphlan_databases  SRS014476-Supragingival_plaque.fasta.gz --input_type fasta > SRS014476-Supragingival_plaque_profile.txt

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