Sequence alignment with bowtie2
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Aligning example reads

Align single-end reads

Next, run:

bowtie2 -x $REF -U reads_1.fq -S eg1.sam

This runs the Bowtie 2 aligner, which aligns a set of unpaired reads to the Lambda phage reference genome using the index generated in the previous step. The alignment results in SAM format are written to the file eg1.sam, and a short alignment summary is written to the console. (Actually, the summary is written to the “standard error” or “stderr” filehandle, which is typically printed to the console.)

To see the first few lines of the SAM output, run:

head -n 5 eg1.sam

The first few lines (beginning with @) are SAM header lines, and the rest of the lines are SAM alignments, one line per read or mate. See the Bowtie 2 manual section on SAM output and the SAM specification for details about how to interpret the SAM file format.

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