Is it necessary to include the gene annotation in Hisat2 (I am not using Tophat) in addition to the indexed reference genome? What are the pros of doing this?
I am looking for novel genes in two different experimental groups ( differential expression analysis).
When do I include the following information in my command?
Cufflinks- reference annotation (GTF)
Cuffmerge- reference annotation (GTF) and reference sequence (Fasta)
Cuffdiff- reference GTF
Thanks for the help.
1 answer
Reference GTF in tophat, cufflinks, cuffmerge and merged.gtf in cuffdiff will differentiate novel genes from known and therefore need to be included if you want known as well as novel genes. But if you want only novel genes, then you can align reads to Genome outside of the reference GTF file and then perform cufflinks and cuffmerge without reference GTF and cuffdiff with merged.gtf.
In tophat, it helped me avoid generation of multiple XLOC ids for single gene id. So I use GTF for tophat. But this happens rarely and only a handful of genes get multiple XLOC ids. I dont see any disadvantage. Dont know about HISAT2. But if HISAT2 allows reference GTF, I will use it.
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