lh3 / bwa

Burrow-Wheeler Aligner for short-read alignment (see minimap2 for long-read alignment)
GNU General Public License v3.0
1.54k stars 556 forks source link

question on mapping to short reference like 1kb #388

Open jianshu93 opened 1 year ago

jianshu93 commented 1 year ago

Dear bwa team,

I am wondering whether mapping reads to a very short reference like the reference is only 1kb or so but reads are 150 bp. I do notice that bowtie2 and bbmap2 will be problematic because they have a significantly less number of reads mapped to those 1kb compare to when those 1kb are part of a much longer sequences (we can alway extract reads mapped to the 1kb according to its position in the longer sequence). I assume it is because essentially all the mappers are based on local alignment, for reads with alignment ratio less than a certain threshold, like 0.4 or so, for example (only part of the reads mapped to 1kb), they will be filtered. Should I worry if I mapped reads to such short references and I want to calculate reference coverage or total number of reads mapped to it.

Thanks,

Jianshu