How to convert FASTA to BED

Question

I have a FASTA file:

> Sequence_1
GCAATGCAAGGAAGTGATGGCGGAAATAGCGTTAGATGTATGTGTAGCGGTCCC...
> Sequence_2
GCAATGCAAGGAAGTGATGGCGGAAATAGCGTTAGATGTATGTGTAGCGGTCCC....
....

I want to generate a BED file for each sequence like:

Sequence_1 0 1500
Sequence_2 0 1700

The BED regions will simply be the size of the sequences.

Q: I did that before with a one-line command. I don't remember what that is, it was on Biostars. I can't find the post now. What's the simplest way to do the conversion?

Answer 1

You can do this easily with bioawk, which is a version of awk with added features facilitating bioinformatics:

bioawk -c fastx '{print $name"\t0\t"length($seq)}' test.fa

-c fastx tells the program that the data should be parsed as fasta or fastq format. This makes the $name and $seq variables available in the awk commands.

Answer 2

It's good practice to have your FASTA indexed, so you can leverage the .fai you are likely to already have. If not, you can just generate the index with samtools and use some awk to make your BED:

samtools faidx $fasta
awk 'BEGIN {FS="\t"}; {print $1 FS "0" FS $2}' $fasta.fai > $fasta.bed

This will maintain tab separation but you can drop the BEGIN statement to use spaces. The BED spec only requires "whitespace" for the simple BED format.

Answer 3

We have many excellent answers! This will be an excellent reference for future users.

I found what exactly what I was asking in my question:

https://www.biostars.org/p/191052/

$ pip install pyfaidx  
$ faidx --transform bed test.fasta > test.bed

This is the one-line command I was asking. The other answers also work, but I want to accept my own answer.

Answer 4

You could adapt this awk one-liner. Note that it assumes that sequence IDs are not longer than 100 characters and that there is no description following the sequence ID on the header line.

cat myseqs.fasta | awk '$0 ~ ">" {print c; c=0;printf substr($0,2,100) "\t0\t"; } $0 !~ ">" {c+=length($0);} END { print c; }'

Otherwise, any Bio* library (Perl, Python, Ruby) provides FASTA format parsers which will extract sequence IDs and lengths.

I'd point out that whilst this resembles BED it is not, strictly-speaking, since BED maps to coordinates on a chromosome or some longer sequence object.

Answer 5

Here is an approach with BioPython. The with statement ensures both the input and output file handles are closed and a lazy approach is taken so that only a single fasta record is held in memory at a time, rather than reading the whole file into memory, which is a bad idea for large input files. The solution makes no assumptions about the sequence ID lengths or the number of lines that the sequences are spread across:

from Bio import SeqIO

with open('sequences.fasta') as in_f, open('sequences.bed','w') as out_f:
    for record in SeqIO.parse(in_f, 'fasta'):
        out_f.write('{}\t0\t{}\n'.format(record.id, len(record)))

Answer 6

Inspired by this answer to a related question on read length distributions, you could do this with Biopython:

from Bio.SeqIO import parse
with open("regions.bed", "w") as bed:
    for record in parse("regions.fasta", "fasta"):
        print(record.id, 0, len(record.seq), sep="\t", file=bed)

Answer 7

If the FASTA sequences are all on a single line, then the following perl one-liner should work:

cat myseqs.fasta | perl -ne 'if(/^>([^ ]+)/){print $1} else {print " 0 ",length,"\n"}'

Explanation:

• If the line begins with a '>', then print everything up to the first space (but don't put a line break at the end)
• Otherwise, print " 0 ", followed by the length of the line, followed by a line break