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The .bcf file generated by bcftools mpileup cannot be opened with BCFtools

Hello everyone! I'm encountering an issue where both "bcftools view" and "bcftools call" are unable to open the .bcf file when using the following code. Does anyone have any suggestions or advice? Thank you!

My codes:

bcftools mpileup -O u -f ~/data/GRCz11/Danio_rerio.GRCz11.dna.toplevel.fa zebrafishAligned.sortedByCoord.out.bam > zebrafish_bcftools.bcf

bcftools call -mv -O v zebrafish_bcftools.bcf -o res.vcf

The error:

Failed to open zebrafish_bcftools.bcf: unknown file type.

The bcftools version is 1.9; however, I was able to use "bcftools view" after converting the MGP mouse VCF file to BCF format.

bcftools view test.vcf -O b -o A1.bcf.gz
bcftools variant-calling
• 2,993 views • link
written by liying • liying

what is the output of file zebrafish_bcftools.bcf ?

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written by Pierre Lindenbaum Pierre Lindenbaum

zebrafish_bcftools.bcf: data; instead of Binary Call Format (BCF) version 2.2 (just like A1.bcf)

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written by liying • liying

1 answer

re-try your command, do not save the output of mpileup in an uncompressed bcf file, but pipe the output into bcftools call

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written by Pierre Lindenbaum Pierre Lindenbaum

Thanks a lot ! I think I may have found the reason. I used bcftools mpileup -O u -f ~/data/GRCz11/Danio_rerio.GRCz11.dna.toplevel.fa zebrafishAligned.sortedByCoord.out.bam -o zebrafish2.bcf to do the variant calling, and I found "[mpileup] 1 samples in 1 input files" in the Log file; meanwhile, I tested bcftools mpileup -O v -f ~/data/GRCz11/Danio_rerio.GRCz11.dna.toplevel.fa zebrafishAligned.sortedByCoord.out.bam > zebrafish.vcf to generate VCF directly. And found that indeed the first sentence in the VCF is "[mpileup].....". It seems that the logging information was input into the BCF file, causing this issue.

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written by liying • liying

I found "[mpileup] 1 samples in 1 input files" in the Log file; meanwhile,

hum... did you use something like nohup ?

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written by Pierre Lindenbaum Pierre Lindenbaum

Yes. I used nohup bcftools ...... &

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written by liying • liying

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