I agree that it is pretty pathetic when a link produced by a tool does not actually work, evidently it tripped up so many people that they added a link to the error message ... only that the link does not work anymore ... geez
what is even more pathetic and absurd is that creating that fasta dictionary is a trivial 15-second job that GATK could easily do itself ... but no OMG ... that would be too much to ask ... it rather complains that it cannot find the file then sends people to wild goose chases ... that is bioinformatics all right
... ok rant over ...
here is what you need to do (FWIW who knows how long this link is valid)
https://gatk.broadinstitute.org/hc/en-us/articles/360036729911-CreateSequenceDictionary-Picard-
just to make things even more confusing, picard may be installed separately and can be invoked as
# Install the picard tools
mamba install -c bioconda picard
# Run the sequence dictionary creation
picard CreateSequenceDictionary -R reference.fa -O reference.dict
In my book I am writing a chapter on human genome variation calling by reproducing a published paper with different methods.
I found that
bcftoolswith almost default settings, outperforms GATK lengthy and tedious "best practices". Moreoverbcftoolsruns in a fraction of time and needs a small fraction of resources ...In my opinion, the so-called "GATK best practices", marking duplicates, base recalibration, etc are a bit outdated, it is information that is being cited and referred to a lot on the account that it was the default approach at the Broad Institute. But the method is so complicated and has so many moving parts and as you note so obtuse and tedious to run.
If accuracy is of utmost importance and you have the computational resources then run the Google DeepVariant; it is substantially better than GATK. And simpler to run as well.
Thank you for the suggestion! I tried nf-core/sarek but I got an error that the dev team still working on so I find tools that get the job done in the mean time.
ah yes, the most important advice is to stay away from nextflow and the like.
These workflow platforms were never designed to teach you how to run anything. As you yourself experienced, all you end up with is endless chasing around nonexisting documentation and fighting the platform instead of learning bioinformatics.
Workflow management platforms are to be used only once you know a bioinformatics process so well you are bored and annoyed that you must retype commands.
To learn a bioinformatics tool, look at the tool documentation, the deepvariant is exquisitely well documented.
You said you used STAR. Are you working on RNAseq or DNAseq?