QACtools: A quality assessment and quality control tool for next-generation sequencing data

Abstract

In recent years, next-generation sequencing technologies have been widely used, and are rapidly changing the landscape of genetics with unimaginable speed. However, the preliminary quality control regulations including trimming adaptor sequences, quality statistics, and depth and coverage statistics need to be applied to raw reads before further analysis. QACtools implements various utilities for processing raw reads in the FASTQ format and alignments in the BAM format. It analyzes some relevant properties of next-generation sequencing data such as average read length, base quality scores, and so on. Additionally, to our knowledge, none of the other tools support depth and coverage statistic that have been provided in our tool for analysis of large DNA sequencing data. It is crucial for overcoming errors in base calling and assembly. We suppose tool is useful for the quality control of NGS data to perform further analysis. This software is an open source application freely available at https://sourceforge.net/projects/qactools/.