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bowtie, tophat vs BLAST

Hi,

I have a very basic question but it confused me a little bit.

For a metatranscriptome data, we can compare it with the NCBI prokaryote genome collections. Shall I use bowtie, tophat these kinds of mapping tools here, or just use BLAST here? What's the difference between this two kinds of tools? What kind of different downstream analysis would be available only for one tool?

Thanks!

blast rna-seq tophat bowtie metatranscriptome
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updated by Ram Ram • written by niu2rseq niu2rseq

1 answer

Hi,

TopHat and Bowtie are aligners - they align short sequences, typically reads, to reference genomes. You are comparing a metatranscriptome to a genome. BLAST should be better suited for you.

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written by Ram Ram

Thank you RamRS.

So shall I perform some kind of assembly of the metatranscriptome reads before doing the BLAST? Can BLAST give me also the expression profiles of each detected bacterial genes?

Thanks!

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updated by Ram Ram • written by niu2rseq niu2rseq

If you have contigs, you will be able to detect more gene sequences, since the contigs are bigger than reads. If you want to do gene prediction, I will vote for doing a little assembly first.

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updated by Ram Ram • written by iraun iraun

Hi, I really like your idea!

So if we want to get the expression profile of each microbial genes to see the dynamics, shall we use bowtie/tophat plus cufflinks, or we can use BLAST tools for this purpose?

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updated by Ram Ram • written by niu2rseq niu2rseq

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