Skip to content

Quick start

  • IsoQuant can installed via pip:

    pip install isoquant
    
  • Via conda (bioconda channel):

    conda create -c conda-forge -c bioconda -n isoquant python=3.12 isoquant
    
  • Or from GitHub:

    git clone https://github.com/ablab/IsoQuant.git 
    cd IsoQuant
    git checkout latest
    pip install -e .
    

Installation typically takes no more than a few minutes.

  • If running simply from the source archive, you will need Python3 (3.8 or higher), gffutils, pysam, biopython, pyfaidx, ssw-py, editdistance and some other common Python libraries to be installed. See requirements.txt for details. You will also need to have minimap2 and samtools to be in your $PATH variable. All required Python libraries can be installed via:

    pip install -r requirements.txt
    
  • Verify your installation by running (typically takes less than 1 minute):

    isoquant --test
    
  • To run IsoQuant on raw FASTQ/FASTA files, use the following command

    isoquant --reference /PATH/TO/reference_genome.fasta \
    --genedb /PATH/TO/gene_annotation.gtf \
    --fastq /PATH/TO/sample1.fastq.gz /PATH/TO/sample2.fastq.gz \
    --data_type (assembly|pacbio_ccs|nanopore) -o OUTPUT_FOLDER
    

    For example, using the toy data provided within this repository,

    ./isoquant --fastq /home/andreyp/ablab/IsoQuant/isoquant_tests/simple_data/chr9.4M.ont.sim.fq.gz \
    --reference /home/andreyp/ablab/IsoQuant/isoquant_tests/simple_data/chr9.4M.fa.gz \
    --genedb /home/andreyp/ablab/IsoQuant/isoquant_tests/simple_data/chr9.4M.gtf.gz \
    --data_type nanopore --complete_genedb -p TEST_DATA --output isoquant_test
    
  • To run IsoQuant on aligned reads (make sure your BAM is sorted and indexed) use the following command:

    isoquant --reference /PATH/TO/reference_genome.fasta \
    --genedb /PATH/TO/gene_annotation.gtf \
    --bam /PATH/TO/sample1.sorted.bam /PATH/TO/sample2.sorted.bam \
    --data_type (assembly|pacbio_ccs|nanopore) -o OUTPUT_FOLDER
    
  • If using official annotations containing gene and transcript features use --complete_genedb to save time.

  • Using reference annotation is optional since version 3.0, you may preform de novo transcript discovery without providing --genedb option':

    isoquant --reference /PATH/TO/reference_genome.fasta \
    --fastq /PATH/TO/sample1.fastq.gz /PATH/TO/sample2.fastq.gz \
    --data_type (assembly|pacbio|nanopore) -o OUTPUT_FOLDER
    
  • If multiple files are provided, IsoQuant will create a single output annotation and a single set of gene/transcript expression tables.