Tophat Error -1: any RNA-Seq alternatives?

[santanasantosl]

Dear members,

I am trying to use Tophat, but it keeps failing with error -1: can not retrieve sequence XXXX from stream. Initially, I though there was some problem with the cluster I was running the analysis on. Because of the error mentioned "stream" I was suspecting of memory error, although I have more than 24GB of RAM per node. Thus, I did a test run in another cluster, and got the very same error. Well, if I run the analysis only using one thread the problem seems to resolve, however this is VERY time consuming and I have a lot of samples to analyze.
So, my suspicions is that I am seeing some bug while processing colorspace data in multiple threads.

I am wondering if any one has seem this problem and know a practical solution for that. Since it seems to be a coding problem I am not sure that there is any easy solution. So, I am wondering if someone has experience with another RNA-Seq analysis pipelines that does not involve Tophat, and could point me to some software alternatives/pipelines.

Thank you.

Lucas

[adamyao]

I had this problem before. I tried two different ways: to increase memory and to use single thread. My machines are 32GB and 128GB. The 32GB always gets error (out of memory) on whole human genome but the 128GB works fine. Good luck.

[pbluescript]

You should try STAR. http://gingeraslab.cshl.edu/STAR/
I've mentioned this elsewhere on the forums, but in the comparisons I've done, STAR yields more mapped reads, more uniquely mapped reads, and more reads with both pairs mapped than Tophat all in about 20% of the time it takes Tophat. The only downside is an increase in potential false positive splice junctions, but those can be filtered out easily enough.
It was just published too:

http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2012/10/25/bioinformatics.bts635.abstract

[santanasantosl]

Adamyao I was suspecting of memory problems, so your input makes sense. Thanks
Thank you pbluescript, I will check STAR.