Cutadapt

Introduction

Cutadapt finds and removes adapter sequences, primers, poly-A tails and other types of unwanted sequence from your high-throughput sequencing reads.

Cleaning your data in this way is often required: Reads from small-RNA sequencing contain the 3’ sequencing adapter because the read is longer than the molecule that is sequenced; amplicon reads start with a primer sequence; and poly-A tails are useful for pulling out RNA from your sample, but typically you don’t want them to be in your reads.

Cutadapt helps with these trimming tasks by finding the adapters or primers in an error-tolerant way. It can also filter reads by length and do quality trimming. Adapter sequences can contain IUPAC wildcard characters. Also, paired-end reads and even colorspace data is supported. If you want, you can also just demultiplex your input data, without removing adapter sequences at all.

Installed version

The currently installed version is 1.9.1.

Documentation

The full documentation can be found here.