HTseq report 80% of reads no feature
Is this number is too large for a mice RNA-seq?
total reads mapped is 12 M from tophat2
__no_feature 10556702
__ambiguous 26522
__too_low_aQual 0
__not_aligned 0
__alignment_not_unique 21173785
• 1,824 views
•
link
1 answer
So 12M initial reads, of which 10.5M didn't overlap exons and there are a LOT of multimappers. I'd say that something went horribly wrong here. Have a look at the alignments in IGV to see if they even make sense.
• 0 views
•
link
Log in to answer this question.
While it shouldn't make a real difference for this question, you should know that Tophat is no longer the "advisable" tool for RNA-seq analysis. The software is deprecated/ in low maintenance and should be replaced by HISAT2, StringTie and ballgown. See this paper: Transcript-level expression analysis of RNA-seq experiments with HISAT, StringTie and Ballgown. (If you can't get access to that publication, let me know and I'll -cough- help you.) There are also other alternatives, including alignment with STAR and bbmap,...
rRNA is a frequent source of contamination in RNA-Seq libraries and produces a high percentage of multi-mappers. I suspect that's your problem.