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Does salmon use phred scores while pseudoaligning (and/or validating mapping)?

Dear Biostar Community,

I would like to know if salmon uses phred scores while pseudoaligning (and/or validating mapping)?

In the negative, what is the reason behind this the choice?

Thanks in advance,

Anthony.

salmon phred

Dear Biostar community,

I have a similar question. Is there quality control measure/score so that I can compare my output of Salmon using different kmer values? I have about 54 bp reads and have used kmer 31,29,27,25,... I would like to know if there is a QC measure/score so that I can know which kmer value to use?

I have looked ad the mapping rates, but it seems it does not tell a significant difference between different kmer values.

Thanks in advance, Karni

It is not good forum etiquette to ask new questions in an existing unrelated thread. Please delete this and post your question as a new thread.

1 answer

Hi Anthony,

No; salmon does not use the PHRED score, either while mapping or aligning. The main reason for not using it during alignment or mapping is that it just tends not to be very useful for this purpose. If a nucleotide inside a reasonably long exact match is bad quality (and therefore likely wrong), it’s almost certainly wrong in all of the mappings where it appears. In terms of finding the best locus (or loci) for the read, the quality score just turns out not to be very useful, while using it incurs extra processing cycles. Clearly, there _are_ cases where the quality scores are useful (e.g. in downstream variant detection, etc.) — however, we found them not to be helpful for our purposes and so we don’t use them.

Best, Rob

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