Hi all,
As a fun little side project I've made a web tool to find runs on the NCBI Sequence Read Archive (SRA) and fetch the download URLs for these. You can do all of this in a couple of clicks, hopefully quite a bit easier than navigating the main SRA pages.
In addition to getting the SRA links the tool now queries the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA) for direct FastQ downloads and also provides these URLs.
All links are given as a simple list and also as a bash script which uses curl to download the data and gives nicer filenames that include the sample name in addition to its accession number.
You can find the tool here: https://ewels.github.io/sra-explorer/
It's open source and in fact just a single HTML file, built using AngularJS and Bootstrap. If you're curious, you can find the code here: https://github.com/ewels/sra-explorer
Phil
Edit ( 28.6.22 by ATpoint ) sra-explorer also (for quite some time now) supports creation of Aspera download links. See this little tutorial on how to setup Aspera (ascp) on Linux and macOS: Setting up Aspera Connect (ascp) on Linux and macOS
Shopping basket/add files you need to collection
URLs
bashscriptAmazing! Works like a charm! Thanks so much!
Works great, very useful utility, thank you!
Very convenient, thank you, also for
multiqc! You might consider adding an option to provide links for downloads driven byAsperaas in my tutorial Fast download of FASTQ files from the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA). That speeds up downloads notably.Nice idea and great tutorial! I've just added this functionality - it would be great if you could have a look and make sure that I haven't made any errors.. Note that I added an option to append a
mvcommand to rename the files. I've never used Aspera myself, so I hope this actually works!Cool, works fine!
Is it possible that this tool is currently not working? Neither my own SRAs, nor just clicking on the examples provided is working. 😢 Thanks!
Yes - I’ve had a bunch of reports about problems over the past few days. I guess that an API endpoint changed somewhere. I’m on holiday at the moment but will take a look when I’m back. Apologies for the inconvenience!
Phil Ewels : Would it be possible add a note to
sra-explorermain page that the tool is not currently working and you are going to fix it?Edit: Main
esearchcall insra-explorerseems to be working.Not easily - I don’t have a computer with me. If I can edit code to add a notice on the web page then I can probably fix whatever the issue is :) I’ll be back home in a few days (though technically still on holiday) so will try to take a look then. If I can’t figure it out quickly then I’ll add a notice.
To follow - I managed to take a quick look in an evening over my holiday and it was not as trivial as I was hoping. I did manage to put up a notice though. I'll try to find some time to sit down with it in the next couple of weeks to do some code refactoring / rewriting and get it up and running again.
Much appreciated. Please let us know when you find a fix. This is the interface NCBI should have provided :-)
Nice tool...i used and works fine......👍🙏
Very convenient tool, much needed! Thanks a lot!
Is there a way to retrieve download links for an entire list of SRR numbers all at once?
You can download links for entire SRR numbers if you have searched for them already. It is not possible to search for multiple SRR# in the initial search box. You could use a wildcard like
SRP0435*expands out toBut
srp043500[All Fields] AND srp043503[All Fields]this search does NOT work. Phil Ewels can comment.It just uses the SRA search - that style of search term doesn't return any hits there either, you can try it: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sra/?term=srp043500%5BAll+Fields%5D+AND+srp043503%5BAll+Fields%5D
Was it intentional to use
ANDinstead ofOR? This works in both the SRA and SRA-explorer:Also to clarify braun_tube - you can check multiple search results and add them to a collection and you'll get the entire list at once. If that's what you meant in your question.
Ah yes. Multiple searches could be added to the cart and then the cart downloaded at the end.
Phil Ewels I was just randomly trying two accessions and used
AND. UsingANDrequires both to return results soORwould indeed be the way to go.Using OR instead of AND between each SRR number in the search box fixed my problem and I got results for all my SRRs at once 👍
If neither OR or AND is specified in the search box then it does AND by default which is why I could not get multiple results at first. Thanks for the great tool.
ok, nice - good to know! :)
I totally was going to post the same comment.....here was my start: SRA-Explorer, is exactly the tool to select multiple files, I would suggest putting OR in place of AND, so that if one pastes in a lists of ..... then I saw your post.