How to filter the OTU by counts with AWK? - awk

Question

I am trying to filter all the singleton from a fasta file.
Here is my input file:
>OTU1;size=3;
ATTCCCCGGGGGGG
>OTU2;size=1;
ATCCGGGACTGATC
>OTU3;size=5;
GAACTATCGGGTAA
>OTU4;size=1;
AATTGGCCATCT
The expected output is:
>OTU1;size=3;
ATTCCCCGGGGGGG
>OTU3;size=5;
GAACTATCGGGTAA
I've tried
awk -F'>' '{if($1>=2) {print $0}' input.fasta > ouput.fasta
but this will remove all the header for each OTU.
Anyone could help me out?

Answer 1

Could you please try following.
awk -F'[=;]' '/^>/{flag=""} $3>=3{flag=1} flag' Input_file

Answer 2

$ awk '/>/{f=/=1;/}!f' file
>OTU1;size=3;
ATTCCCCGGGGGGG
>OTU3;size=5;
GAACTATCGGGTAA

Answer 3

awk -v FS='[;=]' 'prev_sz>=2 && !/size/{print prev RS $0} /size/{prev=$0;prev_sz=$(NF-1)}'
>OTU1;size=3;
ATTCCCCGGGGGGG
>OTU3;size=5;
GAACTATCGGGTAA
Store the size from each line in prev_sz variable and whole line in prev variables. Now check if its >= 2, then print the previous line and the current line. RS is used to print new line.

Answer 4

While all the above methods work, they are limited to the fact that input always has to look the same. I.e the sequence-name in your fasta-file needs to have the form:
>NAME;size=value;
A few solutions can handle a bit more extended sequence-names, but none handle the case where things go a bit more generic, i.e.
>NAME;label1=value1;label2=value2;STRING;label3=value3;
Print sequence where label xxx matches value vvv:
awk '/>{f = /;xxx=vvv;/}f' file.fasta
Print sequence where label xxx has a numeric value p bigger than q:
awk -v label="xxx" -v limit=q \
'BEGIN{ere=";" label "="}
/>/{ f=0; match($0,ere);value=0+substr($0,RSTART+length(ere)); f=(value>limit)}
f' <file>
In the above ere is a regular expression we try to match. We use it to find the location of the value attached to label xxx. This substring will have none-numeric characters after its value, but by adding 0 to it, it is converted to a number, losing all non-numeric values (i.e. 3;label4=value4; is converted to 3). We check if the value is bigger than our limit, and print the sequence based on that result.