- Introduction
- Running the pipeline
- Updating the pipeline
- Reproducibility
- Main arguments
- Job Resources
- Automatic resubmission
- Custom resource requests
- AWS batch specific parameters
- Other command line parameters
Nextflow handles job submissions on SLURM or other environments, and supervises running the jobs. Thus the Nextflow process must run until the pipeline is finished. We recommend that you put the process running in the background through screen
/ tmux
or similar tool. Alternatively you can run nextflow within a cluster job submitted your job scheduler.
It is recommended to limit the Nextflow Java virtual machines memory. We recommend adding the following line to your environment (typically in ~/.bashrc
or ~./bash_profile
):
NXF_OPTS='-Xms1g -Xmx4g'
The typical command for running the pipeline is as follows:
nextflow run lehtiolab/ddamsproteomics --input /path/to/input_definition.txt --tdb /path/to/proteins.fa --mods 'oxidation;carbamidomethylation' -profile standard,docker
This will launch the pipeline with the docker
configuration profile. See below for more information about profiles.
Note that the pipeline will create the following files in your working directory:
work # Directory containing the nextflow working files
results # Finished results (configurable, see below)
.nextflow_log # Log file from Nextflow
# Other nextflow hidden files, eg. history of pipeline runs and old logs.
When you run the above command, Nextflow automatically pulls the pipeline code from GitHub and stores it as a cached version. When running the pipeline after this, it will always use the cached version if available - even if the pipeline has been updated since. To make sure that you're running the latest version of the pipeline, make sure that you regularly update the cached version of the pipeline:
nextflow pull lehtiolab/ddamsproteomics
It's a good idea to specify a pipeline version when running the pipeline on your data. This ensures that a specific version of the pipeline code and software are used when you run your pipeline. If you keep using the same tag, you'll be running the same version of the pipeline, even if there have been changes to the code since.
First, go to the lehtiolab/ddamsproteomics releases page and find the latest version number - numeric only (eg. 1.3.1
). Then specify this when running the pipeline with -r
(one hyphen) - eg. -r 1.3.1
.
This version number will be logged in reports when you run the pipeline, so that you'll know what you used when you look back in the future.
Use this parameter to choose a configuration profile. Profiles can give configuration presets for different compute environments. Note that multiple profiles can be loaded, for example: -profile standard,docker
- the order of arguments is important!
standard
- The default profile, used if
-profile
is not specified at all. - Runs locally and expects all software to be installed and available on the
PATH
.
- The default profile, used if
docker
- A generic configuration profile to be used with Docker
- Pulls software from dockerhub:
lehtiolab/ddamsproteomics
singularity
- A generic configuration profile to be used with Singularity
- Pulls software from singularity-hub
conda
awsbatch
- A generic configuration profile to be used with AWS Batch.
test
- A profile with a complete configuration for automated testing
- Includes links to test data so needs no other parameters
none
- No configuration at all. Useful if you want to build your own config from scratch and want to avoid loading in the default
base
config profile (not recommended).
- No configuration at all. Useful if you want to build your own config from scratch and want to avoid loading in the default
This param passes an mzML definition (txt) file which contains the mzML specifications. This also enables runs with specific fractionation such as HiRIEF or high pH, and the specification of individual instruments per file.
--input /path/to/data/mzmls.txt
The file itself is tab-separated without header, contains a single line per mzML file specified as follows:
/path/to/file instrument_type sample_or_sampleset_name OPTIONAL:fractionation_plate_name OPTIONAL:fraction_nr
Fractionation is automatically detected from this file, and enforced if ANY of the files have a fraction. This mainly has implications for QC though, identification and quantification are not much impacted by specifying fractionation. Instrument type can currently be one of 'qe', 'qehf', 'velos', 'lumos', 'qehfx', 'timstof', or 'lowres'.
Examples of instruments can be found in this MSGF+ parameter file.
Target database. Decoy databases are created "tryptic-reverse" by the pipeline and searches are against a
concatenated database (T-TDC). Decoy database proteins are thus the same length as target while keeping
tryptic residues in place. Tryptic peptides are shuffled but not removed if they match a tryptic peptide
in the target database.
Default behaviour for MSGF+ is to not limit missed cleavage amount, but that can
if desired be set by --maxmiscleav
. For limiting peptide length you may use --minpeplen
and --maxpeplen
, while
allowed charge states can be controlled with --mincharge
, --maxcharge
.
--tdb /path/to/Homo_sapiens.pep.all.fa
Modifications as in UNIMOD, although only a selected number are available by name. You can extend this list
by adding entries to assets/msgfmods.txt
. --ptms
and --locptms
are for stable/labile PTMs respectively,
and they can optionally get isobaric quantification normalization (below). Use --maxvarmods
for specifying
how many variable mods are allowed per peptide (default is 2). If your peptide sample is enriched for phosphorylated
peptides, specify --phospho
to inform the search engine about this. For labile PTM (Phospho mainly) false localization
rate determination, Luciphor2 is used, which can be slightly configured using
--minpsms_luciphor
to set the minimum number of PSMs per charge state that Luciphor needs (default is 50) to build
a model, and --ptm_minscore_high
, to set the minimum luciphor-score of a PTM (default 50) to be included in the
column "other high scoring PTMs".
--mods "Carbamidomethylation;Oxidation" --ptms Acetyl --locptms Phoshpo
The pipeline will produce by default PSM, peptide, and protein tables. You may pass FASTA databases that contain mixtures of ENSEMBL, Uniprot, or other types of entries. Use --genes
and --ensg
to output a gene(name)-centric table and an ENSG-centric table. If you rather have less output, use --onlypeptides
to not output a protein table. If you have a HiRIEF table of predicted isoelectric points for peptides, you
may specify it by --hirief /path/to/table.txt
.
Isobaric data can be specified as such --isobaric 'set1:tmt10plex:127N:128N set2:tmtpro:sweep set3:itraq8plex:intensity'
. Here PSMs will be quantified for 3 different isobaric sample sets in a somewhat contrived example with different chemistries. Isobaric quantitation is done using OpenMS IsobaricAnalyzer and will also output the precursor purity (fraction of precursor intensity in the selection window) to the PSM table. A filter can be used to set a minimum purity for PSM isobaric quant to not be set to NA, using e.g. --minprecursorpurity 0.3
, default is not to filter. The resulting values will be summarized from PSM to peptide/protein/gene by taking median PSM values per feature. Prior to this, they can be log2-transformed and normalized to e.g. an internal standard using denominator channels as above in set1
, or median sweep (i.e. use median PSM value as denominator for each PSM in set2
) to generate log2(ratios). A possibility shown in set3
is also to output non-normalized median PSM intensity per protein. When result tables have been summarized these can be median-centered, which is passed using --normalize
. By default, PSMs with an NA value in any channel will not be used in summarizing isobaric quantification data. If you want to use these (possibly more noisy) PSMs, e.g. when having empty channels, you can pass --keepnapsmsquant
.
MS1 quantitation is done using Dinosaur and its features are aligned to PSMs using msstitch, using summed intensity of a feature. To not output any MS1 or isobaric data, use --noquant
. If Dinosaur for some reason doesn't work, you can use Hardklor/Kronik, by specifying --hardklor
DEqMS is used for DE analysis using --deqms
and it needs to know your sample group names. For this, you can pass a TSV file with sample names to --sampletable
, it should contain a line for each channel/set combination with channel, set, sample, sample group e.g.:
126 setA DMSO1 CTRL
127N setA ABC1 TREAT
127C setA DMSO2 CTRL
128N setA ABC2 TREAT
129N setA pool
...
For DE analysis, sample-channels that e.g represent internal standards will be filtered out if no sample group is given, see above 129N channel. N.B. Even when not using DEqMS you can provide a sample table for annotation of your quant output.
As mentioned, labile PTMS reported by the search engine will be scored using Luciphor2, which will output the best scoring PTM localization and a false localization rate. Note that this is only beneficial for labile PTMs. Aside from that if any high-scoring PTMs are found by luciphor the pipeline will report these as well. All of this will end up in a separate PTM PSM table and a PTM peptide table.
When passing --totalproteomepsms
, the isobaric quant ratios for matching genes from a global search (i.e. no modifications) will be subtracted from the PTM peptide table quant. If --onlypeptides
is used, quant from proteins will be used as a denominator.
For normalizing PTM tables, --normalize
can be used for median-centering. Since PTM tables can be somewhat small and possibly skewed in their quantitation, a separate gene table is prepared from the PSMs in --totalproteomepsms
, to get the channel median normalization factors from.
To annotate peptide/protein/gene results after a search, marking hits in another protein fasta database (e.g. bait proteins, contaminants), you can if needed, supply those external fasta files by --report_seqmatch 'dbfile1.fa;dbfile2.fa'
. This will generate
one column for each file in the result files, containing the fasta IDs for the record that a peptide (or any peptide from a protein) matched to.
If you have finished a rather large analysis and wish to rerun a part of it or add more fractions, due to e.g. new MS data, you may do so by passing
--targetpsms oldpsmtable.txt --decoypsms old_decoy_psms.txt \
--targetpsmlookup old_target_psmlookup.sql \
--decoypsmlookup old_decoy_lookup.sqlite \
--ptmpsms old_ptm_psmtable.txt # Optional of course
Now you can run a single sample set and combine the output with the previous run, which if it has an identical set name, will be cleaned first (the set will be removed from old output). Make sure to use the same parameters to get the same result for the old data, which will be regenerated from the PSM table.
Each step in the pipeline has a default set of requirements for number of CPUs, memory and time. For most of the steps in the pipeline, if the job exits with an error code of 137
or 140
(exceeded requested resources) it will automatically resubmit with higher requests (2 x original, then 3 x original). If it still fails after three times then the pipeline is stopped.
Wherever process-specific requirements are set in the pipeline, the default value can be changed by creating a custom config file. See the files in conf
for examples.
Running the pipeline on AWS Batch requires a couple of specific parameters to be set according to your AWS Batch configuration. Please use the -awsbatch
profile and then specify all of the following parameters.
The JobQueue that you intend to use on AWS Batch.
The AWS region to run your job in. Default is set to eu-west-1
but can be adjusted to your needs.
Please make sure to also set the -w/--work-dir
and --outdir
parameters to a S3 storage bucket of your choice - you'll get an error message notifying you if you didn't.
The output directory where the results will be saved.
Name for the pipeline run. If not specified, Nextflow will automatically generate a random mnemonic.
This is used in the QC report (if not default)
NB: Single hyphen (core Nextflow option)
Specify this when restarting a pipeline. Nextflow will used cached results from any pipeline steps where the inputs are the same, continuing from where it got to previously.
You can also supply a run name to resume a specific run: -resume [run-name]
. Use the nextflow log
command to show previous run names.
NB: Single hyphen (core Nextflow option)
Specify the path to a specific config file (this is a core NextFlow command).
NB: Single hyphen (core Nextflow option)
Note - you can use this to override defaults.
Use to set a top-limit for the default memory requirement for each process. Should be a string in the format integer-unit. eg. `--max_memory '8.GB'``
Use to set a top-limit for the default time requirement for each process.
Should be a string in the format integer-unit. eg. --max_time '2.h'
Use to set a top-limit for the default CPU requirement for each process.
Should be a string in the format integer-unit. eg. --max_cpus 1