FAQs

List of recommended software tools for downloading sequencing data

Occasionally, large files become corrupted during download. You can determine whether this has occurred by comparing the checksum of a file before and after download. We have placed checksums for your fastq.gz files in your run directory in a file called md5sum.txt. Compare the values in this file to new checksums calculated on your downloaded files.

The Cannon cluster serves Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Science (FAS) and School of Public Health (HSPH). For more information, see the RC Website

By default, reads from Illumina’s NextSeq are preprocessed to remove adapter sequences. If your downstream analysis requires all reads to have a fixed length, this processing can be suppressed. No adapter trimming or other preprocessing is performed on reads generated by the HiSeq machines.

When aligning paired reads, alignment tools may assume that your R1 and R2 fastq files are sorted in the same order. When we provide R1 and R2 fastq files to you, they are sorted correctly.

However, if you preprocess your reads in a manner that changes the order of the reads, this can result in the wrong reads being treated as pairs. In this case, the aligner reports a high percentage of discordant alignments.

Alternatively, if your read length is small and adapter trimming has been performed, it is possible that some reads have been entirely trimmed and have 0 length. This will result in a blank read in your fastq file. Some tools such as TopHat will skip such reads, resulting in all subsequent read pairings being mismatched. To resolve this issue, you can preprocess your reads with Trimmomatic and specify a minimum read length.