Description

SAM Tools provide various utilities for manipulating alignments in the SAM format,
including sorting, merging, indexing and generating alignments in a per-position format.


Software Category: bio

For detailed information, visit the Samtools
website.

Available Versions

To find the available versions and learn how to load them, run:

module spider samtools

The output of the command shows the available Samtools
module versions.

For detailed information about a particular Samtools
module, including how to load the module, run the module spider command with the module’s full version label. For example:

module spider samtools/1.17

Build Your Own Version

Users may build their own versions of Samtools
if they wish to use a different compiler or software version. Instructions are available on the Samtools
website.

Convert SAM to BAM with Samtools

samtools view can convert human-readable SAM files to binary BAM files. Below is a simple command to convert SAM files to BAM files. The -S option specifies that the input is in SAM format, while the -b option outputs to a BAM file:

samtools view -bS example.sam > example.bam

To preview the first five lines of the new BAM file:

samtools view example.bam | head

Most downstream analyses require your BAM files to be sorted, which can be achieved by:

samtools sort example.bam -o example_sorted.bam

If you would like to visualize your BAM file using some viewer like IGV, you will need to create an index file

samtools index example_sorted.bam

Finally, samtools flagstat is a good way to get simple statistics from a BAM file including QC, duplicates, mapped reads, and many others

samtools flagstat example_sorted.bam

Slurm Script Example

To run Samtools
on the HPC system, a script similar to the following can be used.

#!/bin/bash
#SBATCH -N 1
#SBATCH -n 1
#SBATCH -t 1:00:00
#SBATCH -p standard
#SBATCH -A mygroup

module purge
module load samtools

samtools view -bS example.sam > example.bam

To speed up your code, use multiple cpus per task. Here, we ask for 8 with the --cpus-per-task option, but only specify 7 in our samtools command to leave one for the manager process:

#!/bin/bash
#SBATCH -N 1
#SBATCH -n 1
#SBATCH --cpus-per-task=8
#SBATCH -t 1:00:00
#SBATCH -p standard
#SBATCH -A mygroup

module purge
module load samtools

samtools view -bS -@ 7 example.sam > example.bam