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Tophat Error: Gtf To Fasta Returned An Error

Dear all,

I am a beginner with Tophat and I am trying to align RNA seq reads to the mouse genome.

From running the following command: tophat -p 8 -G genes.gtf -o DIR genome lane1.fastq,lane2.fastq

I get the following:

Beginning TopHat run (v2.0.6)

Checking for Bowtie Bowtie version: 2.0.2.0 Checking for Samtools Samtools version: 0.1.18.0 Checking for Bowtie index files Checking for reference FASTA file Generating SAM header for genome format: fastq quality scale: phred33 (default) Reading known junctions from GTF file Preparing reads left reads: min. length=51, max. length=51, 15308629 kept reads (1316 discarded) Creating transcriptome data files.. [FAILED] Error: gtf_to_fasta returned an error.

I thank you in advance for any help you might provide.

Noel

tophat gtf fasta error

3 answers

A common error in that step is the sequence names in the index and the GTF file don't match.

Even if they were downloaded from Illumina's Igenomes? I will check that nevertheless! Thanks!

Never trust downloaded data, first verify it it's the right data and it's complete, large files are likely to be truncated or corrupted when you download them.

Hi, I am getting the same error. I have checked the names are same. Also I am using both gtf file and fasta file from ensemble (meaning I don't have different format of chromosomes name). When I am using UCSC index and gtf file everything works well. But UCSC doesn't provide genes name only genes ids. That's why I want to switch to ensembl. I was wondering if you have any idea about this! Or any new progress in the current issue!

Hi Noel,

Did you find the answer of your problem, as I am facing the same problem. I checked names of the index and gtf files is same in my case then also i get same error message.

Please share your thought.

thanks

Hi Hathi,

Sorry for my very late reply. I ended up by downloading another reference genome (NCBI instead of UCSC) and then it worked out for me.

Noel

hey... i am getting the same error.... from NCBI which referecne geneome did u download ??? please reply

Are there examples of bowtie ref file and the gtf file that match, so I can use them as a reference?

I am having trouble in creating the bowtie index file that matches the GTF file for a specific cytoband of the human genome..

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