fastp: an ultra-fast all-in-one FASTQ preprocessor

Abstract

AbstractMotivationQuality control and preprocessing of FASTQ files are essential to providing clean data for downstream analysis. Traditionally, a different tool is used for each operation, such as quality control, adapter trimming, and quality filtering. These tools are often insufficiently fast as most are developed using high-level programming languages (e.g., Python and Java) and provide limited multi-threading support. Reading and loading data multiple times also renders preprocessing slow and I/O inefficient.ResultsWe developed fastp as an ultra-fast FASTQ preprocessor with useful quality control and data-filtering features. It can perform quality control, adapter trimming, quality filtering, per-read quality cutting, and many other operations with a single scan of the FASTQ data. It also supports unique molecular identifier preprocessing, poly tail trimming, output splitting, and base correction for paired-end data. It can automatically detect adapters for single-end and paired-end FASTQ data. This tool is developed in C++ and has multi-threading support. Based on our evaluation, fastp is 2–5 times faster than other FASTQ preprocessing tools such as Trimmomatic or Cutadapt despite performing far more operations than similar tools.Availability and ImplementationThe open-source code and corresponding instructions are available at https://github.com/OpenGene/fastpContactchen@haplox.com