EMBOSS Needle: Read sequences from stdin

Question

[pld]

Is it possible to pass sequences through needle via stdin? I have a great deal of all to all runs to make and I don't want to generate an enormous number of files, or make temporary files.

I've tried cat seq1.fasta seq2.fasta | needle -filter... but it throws errors.

[Ashutosh Pandey]

Pasted as an answer

Answer 1

[brentp]

needle -filter <(echo -e ">a\nCAAAAAAAAATTAAAAAAAAAAAAAACCCCCCCTTCCA") \
               <(echo -e ">a\nCAAAAGGAAAAATTAAAAAAAAAAAAAACCCCCCCTTCCA")

Answer 2

[Alex Reynolds]

Perhaps look into using mkfifo to set up named pipes to stream data to placeholder files, which can be used with some tools that do not read streams: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Named_pipe

Answer 3

[Ashutosh Pandey]

needle takes two files as input. First file contains sequence to be aligned to the sequence or sequences in the second file. The first file can contain only one sequence and the second file can contain multiple sequences and needle will align the sequence from the first file to every sequence in the second file. Now coming to your question:

"filter" option only lets you to give the first sequence as a standard input. Here you are giving both the sequences as a standard input and as a result needle is not being able to detect the second input.

You can try:

needle "cat seq1.fasta |" "cat seq.2fasta |"

[Ashutosh Pandey]

I just checked the command and its working but you will have to use -auto in the command line to turn off the prompts. For e.g. needle -auto "cat seq1.fasta |" "cat seq.2fasta |"