kallisto-align runs kallisto, processes its internal data object into an alignment incidence matrix, and exports the matrix in a pre-defined binary format for use with other tools such as emase or emase-zero. It is a companion utility for our bigger project that aims to provide a suite of tools to compare, contrast, or combine the results of different alignment strategies as envisioned in our alntools.

Requirements

CMake version >= 2.8.12
HDF5 C library
zlib

Installation

To build kallisto-align you simply clone and compile.

$ git clone https://github.com/churchill-lab/kallisto-align.git
$ cd kallisto-align
$ cmake .
$ make

Note: kallisto will be downloaded and compiled for you and be located at: external/src/kallisto-build/src/kallisto.

You can now either keep the kallisto and kallisto-align binaries where they are or move them to a more suitable location, e.g. /usr/local/bin.

Usage

We first need to build a kallisto index file. For example, given our target sequences are in a fasta file transcriptome.fa:

$ kallisto index -i transcriptome.idx transcriptome.fa

Please refer to the kallisto manual for more options.

Once the index file is created, you can run kallisto-align:

kallisto-align [OPTIONS...]

Options:

  -f, --file READ FILE    Input read file name
  -i, --index INDEX FILE  Input index file name
  -b, --bin OUTPUT FILE   Output file name
  --reads                 Toggle read-level binary format (Format=0), else Equivalence Classes
  -l, --load              View the binary file
  --help                  Print this message and exit

For example,

$ kallisto-align -f my_sample.fastq -i transcriptome.idx -b my_sample.bin

The binary file can be converted into emase format with alntools. It can also be used directly with emase-zero.

Output