Our Research Projects

de novo metatranscriptomic assembly of crab and bacterial RNA.

This is a project which is currently making use of HPC facilities at Newcastle University. It is active.

Project Contacts

For further information about this project, please contact:


Project Description

The analysis involves processing 20 samples for a de novo metatranscriptomic assembly of crab and bacterial RNA.

The aim is to evaluate whether the bacterial communities associated with crab gills show transcriptomic shifts under different oxygen exposure conditions.


Software or Compute Methods

File handling & QC:

Merging FastQ files: cat

Read quality control: FastQC, MultiQC



Pre‑processing:

Adapter/quality trimming: Trim Galore!, fastp

Removal of genome contaminants: BBSplit, Kraken

Removal of rRNA: SortMeRNA



Alignment & quantification options:

STAR → Salmon

STAR → RSEM

HiSAT2



Post‑alignment processing:

Sorting and indexing: SAMtools

Duplicate marking: Picard MarkDuplicates

Transcript assembly/quantification: StringTie



Coverage files:

BEDTools, bedGraphToBigWig



Functional annotation:

eggNOG‑mapper



Quality control:

RSeQC

Qualimap



Differential expression & analysis:

DESeq2

Data analysis in R / Python