I am new to chip-seq analysis. I am using Bowtie to align one fastQ file to reference genome. Do I do alignment one file at a time or can I run all 9 files at the same time? I found this useful page: http://seqanswers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=14318 but I would like to know where they are actually writing their commands/promts --> terminal in mac?
This is probably unpopular opinion since most people here are very advanced in this sort of thing. But coming from a primarily wetlab background and only about a month of bioinformatic work, I started off by aligning my fastq files one at a time. Sure it's slow, but you learn quite a bit.
Yes they bowtie uses the terminal to write commands.
EDIT: Misunderstood, you should definitely merge all fastq files before running.
if the files are all from the same experiment/replicate/condition you can concatenate your fastq files and then run bowtie.
not sure how big are your files but running bowtie locally (i.e. your mac) is not the best idea. normally these analysis, being VERY computationally expensive, are run on a UNIX server that has lots or memory and a number or CPUs available (although your mac should have multiple cores depending from when you got it).
check with your IT department to make sure you can have access to it.
Before you worry about the alignments it sounds to me like you should spend a couple of hours learning about basics of unix here. Once you become somewhat familiar with the command line, implementing solutions found here and on SeqAnswers will be (relatively) easy.
This is probably unpopular opinion since most people here are very advanced in this sort of thing. But coming from a primarily wetlab background and only about a month of bioinformatic work, I started off by aligning my fastq files one at a time. Sure it's slow, but you learn quite a bit.
Yes they bowtie uses the terminal to write commands.
EDIT: Misunderstood, you should definitely merge all fastq files before running.
Thank you all!