How to move the last 4 characters of all FASTA headers to the beginning?

Question

[fibar]

My fasta headers of my FASTA file go like this:

>M02529:151:000000000-AJBNG:1:1101:20806:3573:133
TGGGGAATTGTTCGCAATGGGCGCAAGCCTGACGACGCAACGCC
>M02529:151:000000000-AJBNG:1:1101:8182:3623:133
TCGAGAATAATTCACAATGGGGGCAACCCTGATGGTGCAACGCCG

The "133" is the sample name, and I need it at the beginning of the header followed by a dot, like this:

>:133.M02529:151:000000000-AJBNG:1:1101:20806:3573
TGGGGAATTGTTCGCAATGGGCGCAAGCCTGACGACGCAACGCC
>:133.M02529:151:000000000-AJBNG:1:1101:8182:3623
TCGAGAATAATTCACAATGGGGGCAACCCTGATGGTGCAACGCCG

I would be glad to get a 'sed' or 'awk' command to do it and modify my FASTA file. Thanks a lot!

Cheers!

[John]

Are you sure its always 4 characters and not "the characters after the last semicolon, plus the semicolon itself"?

[fibar]

In this case, the last 4 characters work (they range btw 133-166). However, I also take your suggestion as an option, thanks!

Answer 1

[Pierre Lindenbaum]

$ echo -e ">M02529:151:000000000-AJBNG:1:1101:20806:3573:133\nA" | awk -F '[>:]' '/^>/{printf(">:%s.%s:%s:%s:%s:%s:%s:%s\n",$9,$2,$3,$4,$5,$6,$7,$8);next;} {print;}'

>:133.M02529:151:000000000-AJBNG:1:1101:20806:3573
A

[fibar]

Thanks a lot Pierre. I'm sorry I was not totally clear. Could you please adapt your command to modify an entire FASTA file?

Answer 2

[Daniel]

Here's the code:

sed -i 's/>\(.*\)\(....\)/>\2\1/' myfile.fasta

Here's the why, so you can learn for next time:

sed -i        ## The -i flag means "do this on the file rather than outputing to a new one"

's/abc/def/'  ## s/  means to substitute what is within the first set of forward slashes / / with the second (all enclosed in single quotes)

\(12345\)     ## Stuff found between brackets can be referred to by \NUMBER in the next section

>\(.*\)       ## here we say "starts with a greater than symbol '>', then '.*' means 'any character, any number of times', so we collect everything after a '>' into number 1 (for later) by putting it between \( and \).

\(....\)      ## EXCEPT! for the last four characters. A period '.' means any one character, so doing 4 means put the last 4 characters into number2 for later.

>\2\1         ## Now we say what we want to swap what we matched with, so we want the '>' symbol again, then the second thing we matched '\2' then the first thing '\1'

myfile.fasta ## Lastly, put the file you're working on.

Hope this helps you or others. #LazyFridayAfternoon.

Edit: If you wanted to lose the begining colon, and add a period afterwards, this would work:

sed -i 's/>\(.*\):\(...\)/>\2.\1/' myfile.fasta

That says the ':' is outside of what you want to keep, then you keep only 3 characters, and then add a '.' after the match in the second half of the expression.

#SuperLazyFridayAfternoon

[fibar]

Thanks Daniel!