Usage

The barcode program has two subcommands; one for the creation of a set of barcodes and one for the validation of an existing set of barcodes.

To make a set of barcodes and write this set to a file named barcodes.txt, use the following command:

barcode make barcodes.txt

barcodes.txt will now contain a list of barcodes that all have length 8, and no barcode will contain a mononucleotide stretch longer than 2.

The length of the barcodes can be controlled with the -l parameter, the minimum edit distance is controlled with the -d option and the maximum mononucleotide stretch length can be set with the -s option. So if we want to make a list of barcodes of length 10, a minimum edit distance of 5 (allowing for the correction of 2 read errors) and a maximum mononucleotide stretch of 1, we use the following command:

barcode make -d 5 -l 10 -s 1 barcodes.txt

To verify a list of existing barcodes, use the command:

barcode test barcode.txt

This will check the distance between any pair of barcodes and will tell you how many barcodes violate the distance constraint. Again, the minimum edit distance can be set with the -d parameter.

Additionally, a good set of barcodes can be extracted by providing an output file via the -o option:

barcode test -o good_barcodes.txt barcodes.txt