Manual

Typing kallisto produces a list of usage options, which are:

kallisto 0.43.1

Usage: kallisto <CMD> [arguments] ..

Where <CMD> can be one of:

    index         Builds a kallisto index
    quant         Runs the quantification algorithm
    pseudo        Runs the pseudoalignment step
    h5dump        Converts HDF5-formatted results to plaintext
    version       Prints version information
    cite          Prints citation information

Running kallisto <CMD> without arguments prints usage information for <CMD>

The usage commands are:

index

kallisto index builds an index from a FASTA formatted file of target sequences. The arguments for the index command are:

kallisto 0.43.1
Builds a kallisto index

Usage: kallisto index [arguments] FASTA-files

Required argument:
-i, --index=STRING          Filename for the kallisto index to be constructed

Optional argument:
-k, --kmer-size=INT         k-mer (odd) length (default: 31, max value: 31)
    --make-unique           Replace repeated target names with unique names

The Fasta file supplied can be either in plaintext or gzipped format.

quant

kallisto quant runs the quantification algorithm. The arguments for the quant command are:

kallisto 0.43.1
Computes equivalence classes for reads and quantifies abundances

Usage: kallisto quant [arguments] FASTQ-files

Required arguments:
-i, --index=STRING            Filename for the kallisto index to be used for
                              quantification
-o, --output-dir=STRING       Directory to write output to

Optional arguments:
    --bias                    Perform sequence based bias correction
-b, --bootstrap-samples=INT   Number of bootstrap samples (default: 0)
    --seed=INT                Seed for the bootstrap sampling (default: 42)
    --plaintext               Output plaintext instead of HDF5
    --fusion                  Search for fusions for Pizzly
    --single                  Quantify single-end reads
    --fr-stranded             Strand specific reads, first read forward
    --rf-stranded             Strand specific reads, first read reverse
-l, --fragment-length=DOUBLE  Estimated average fragment length
-s, --sd=DOUBLE               Estimated standard deviation of fragment length
                              (default: -l, -s values are estimated from paired
                               end data, but are required when using --single)
-t, --threads=INT             Number of threads to use (default: 1)
    --pseudobam               Output pseudoalignments in SAM format to stdout

kallisto can process either single-end or paired-end reads. The default running mode is paired-end and requires an even number of FASTQ files represented as pairs, e.g.

kallisto quant -i index -o output pairA_1.fastq pairA_2.fastq pairB_1.fastq pairB_2.fastq

For single-end mode you supply the --single flag, as well as the -l and -s options, and list any number of FASTQ files, e.g

kallisto quant -i index -o output --single -l 200 -s 20 file1.fastq.gz file2.fastq.gz file3.fastq.gz

FASTQ files can be either plaintext or gzipped.

Important note: only supply one sample at a time to kallisto. The multiple FASTQ (pair) option is for users who have samples that span multiple FASTQ files.

In the case of single-end reads, the -l option must be used to specify the average fragment length. Typical Illumina libraries produce fragment lengths ranging from 180–200 bp but it’s best to determine this from a library quantification with an instrument such as an Agilent Bioanalyzer. For paired-end reads, the average fragment length can be directly estimated from the reads and the program will do so if -l is not used (this is the preferred run mode).

The number of bootstrap samples is specified using -b. Note that because of the large amount of data that may be produced when the number of bootstrap samples is high, kallisto outputs bootstrap results in HDF5 format. The h5dump command can be used afterwards to convert this output to plaintext, however most convenient is to analyze bootstrap results with sleuth.

kallisto quant produces three output files by default:

• abundances.h5 is a HDF5 binary file containing run info, abundance esimates, bootstrap estimates, and transcript length information length. This file can be read in by sleuth
• abundances.tsv is a plaintext file of the abundance estimates. It does not contains bootstrap estimates. Please use the --plaintext mode to output plaintext abundance estimates. Alternatively, kallisto h5dump can be used to output an HDF5 file to plaintext. The first line contains a header for each column, including estimated counts, TPM, effective length.
• run_info.json is a json file containing information about the run

Optional arguments

• --bias learns parameters for a model of sequences specific bias and corrects the abundances accordlingly.

• -t, --threads specifies the number of threads to be used both for pseudoalignment and running bootstrap. The default value is 1 thread, specifying more than the number of bootstraps or the number of cores on your machine has no additional effect.

• --fr-stranded runs kallisto in strand specific mode, only fragments where the first read in the pair pseudoaligns to the forward strand of a transcript are processed. If a fragment pseudoaligns to multiple transcripts, only the transcripts that are consistent with the first read are kept.

• --rf-stranded same as --fr-stranded but the first read maps to the reverse strand of a transcript.

• --fusion does normal quantification, but additionally looks for reads that do not pseudoalign because they are potentially from fusion genes. All output is written to the file fusion.txt in the output folder.

Pseudobam

--pseudobam outputs all pseudoalignments in SAM format to the standard output. The stream can either be redirected into a file, or converted to bam using samtools.

For example

kallisto quant -i index -o out --pseudobam r1.fastq r2.fastq > out.sam

or by piping directly into samtools

kallisto quant -i index -o out --pseudobam r1.fastq r2.fastq | samtools view -Sb - > out.bam

A detailed description of the SAM output is here.

pseudo

kallisto pseudo runs only the pseudoalignment step and is meant for usage in single cell RNA-seq. The arguments for the pseudo command are:

kallisto 0.43.1
Computes equivalence classes for reads and quantifies abundances

Usage: kallisto pseudo [arguments] FASTQ-files

Required arguments:
-i, --index=STRING            Filename for the kallisto index to be used for
                              pseudoalignment
-o, --output-dir=STRING       Directory to write output to

Optional arguments:
-u  --umi                     First file in pair is a UMI file
-b  --batch=FILE              Process files listed in FILE
    --single                  Quantify single-end reads
-l, --fragment-length=DOUBLE  Estimated average fragment length
-s, --sd=DOUBLE               Estimated standard deviation of fragment length
                              (default: -l, -s values are estimated from paired
                               end data, but are required when using --single)
-t, --threads=INT             Number of threads to use (default: 1)
    --pseudobam               Output pseudoalignments in SAM format to stdout

The form of the command and the meaning of the parameters are identical to the quant command. However, pseudo does not run the EM-algorithm to quantify abundances. In addition the pseudo command has an option to specify many cells in a batch file, e.g.

kallisto pseudo -i index -o output -b batch.txt

which will read information about each cell in the batch.txt file and process all cells simultaneously.

The format of the batch file is

#id file1 file 2
cell1 cell1_1.fastq.gz cell1_1.fastq.gz
cell2 cell2_1.fastq.gz cell2_1.fastq.gz
cell3 cell3_1.fastq.gz cell3_1.fastq.gz
...

where the first column is the id of the cell and the next two fields are the corresponding files containing the paired end reads. Any lines starting with # are ignored. In the case of single end reads, specified with --single, only one file should be specified per cell.

When the --umi option is specified the batch file is of the form

#id umi-file file-1
cell1 cell_1.umi cell_1.fastq.gz
cell2 cell_2.umi cell_2.fastq.gz
cell3 cell_3.umi cell_3.fastq.gz
...

where the umi-file is a text file of the form

TTACACTGAC
CCACTCTATG
CAGGAAATCG
...

listing the Unique Molecular Identifier (UMI) for each read. The order of UMIs and reads in the fastq file must match. Even though the UMI data is single end we do not require or make use of the fragment length.

When run in UMI mode kallisto will use the sequenced reads to pseudoalign and find an equivalence class, but rather than count the number of reads for each equivalence class, kallisto counts the number of distinct UMIs that pseudoalign to each equivalence class.

h5dump

kallisto h5dump converts HDF5-formatted results to plaintext. The arguments for the h5dump command are:

kallisto 0.43.1
Converts HDF5-formatted results to plaintext

Usage:  kallisto h5dump [arguments] abundance.h5

Required argument:
-o, --output-dir=STRING       Directory to write output to

version

kallisto version displays the current version of the software.

cite

kallisto cite displays the citation for the paper.