Ideas/To Do

This is a rather unsorted list of features that would be nice to have, of things that could be improved in the source code, and of possible algorithmic improvements.

  • show average error rate
  • In colorspace and probably also for Illumina data, gapped alignment is not necessary
  • --progress
  • run pylint, pychecker
  • length histogram
  • check whether input is FASTQ although -f fasta is given
  • search for adapters in the order in which they are given on the command line
  • more tests for the alignment algorithm
  • deprecate --rest-file
  • --detect prints out best guess which of the given adapters is the correct one
  • alignment algorithm: make a ‘banded’ version
  • it seems the str.find optimization isn’t very helpful. In any case, it should be moved into the Aligner class.
  • allow to remove not the adapter itself, but the sequence before or after it
  • convert adapter to lowercase
  • warn when given adapter sequence contains non-IUPAC characters

Specifying adapters

The idea is to deprecate the -b and -g parameters. Only -a is used with a special syntax for each adapter type. This makes it a bit easier to add new adapter types in the feature.

back -a ADAPTER -a ADAPTER or -a ...ADAPTER
suffix -a ADAPTER$ -a ...ADAPTER$
front -g ADAPTER -a ADAPTER...
prefix -g ^ADAPTER -a ^ADAPTER...
anywhere -b ADAPTER -a ...ADAPTER... ???
paired (not implemented) -a ADAPTER...ADAPTER or -a ^ADAPTER...ADAPTER

Or add only -a ADAPTER... as an alias for -g ^ADAPTER and -a ...ADAPTER as an alias for -a ADAPTER.

Another idea: Allow something such as -a ADAP$TER or -a ADAPTER$NNN. This would be a way to specify less strict anchoring.

Paired-end trimming

  • Could also use a paired-end read merger, then remove adapters with -a and -g
  • Should minimum overlap be sum of the two overlaps in each read?

Single-letter command-line options

Remaining characters: All uppercase letters except A, B, G, M, N, O Lowercase letters: i, j, k, l, s, w