Usage

Command line usage

General way to execute VDJtools routines would be the following,

java -Xmx16G -jar vdjtools.jar RoutineName [arguments] -m metadata.txt output/prefix

Output prefix could be either an output directory name (if ended with /) or an output file prefix. Most VDJtools routines will append the prefix with an intuitive suffix and extension.

The -m metadata.txt argument specifies a metadata file with relative sample paths, sample names and any other information to provide this information later in analysis. For more details, see the Metadata section.

Alternatively, -m argument could be substituted with a space-separated list of files, e.g.

java -Xmx16G -jar vdjtools.jar RoutineName sample1.txt[.gz] sample2.txt[.gz] ... output/prefix

Whether not explicitly used (such as in “…Plot” routines) and applicable, plotting is turned on with -p argument.

The -h argument will bring up help message for specified routine.

Warning

Consider allocating sufficient memory for Java Virtual Machine when running the pipeline. To do so, execute the java with the -Xmx argument, e.g.:

java -Xmx16G -jar vdjtools.jar RoutineName [arguments]

If insufficient amount memory is allocated, the Java Virtual Machine could drop with a Java Heap Space Out of Memory error.

Warning

Due to JAR loading overhead, running VDJtools for a batch of samples should be preferred to running VDJtools separately for each sample if possible. See Metadata section for more details.

Tip

Some routines could be memory demanding, especially when running sample intersection/joining/pooling with a high number of large (~1,000,000 clonotypes) datasets. Setting the -Xmx argument to 20-60Gb of memory should be enough for most purposes, e.g. 100 samples with 500,000 clonotypes on average.

Another way to work this around is to down-sample datasets to ~100,000 reads each using the DownSample routine.

Importing clonotype tables

In order to proceed with VDJtools analysis datasets should be converted to VDJtools format (see VDJtools format). To do this run either of the following commands:

java -Xmx16G -jar vdjtools.jar Convert -S software -m metadata.txt ... output_dir/

or

java -Xmx16G -jar vdjtools.jar Convert -S software sample1.txt[.gz] sample2.txt[.gz] ... output_dir/

An additional -c flag could be set to compress output files.