Can you use periods in sequencing file names?

1

Hello,
Some of my gz sequence files have _ (underscores) or - (dashes) in the file names. These are appearing to cause issues in the MiSeqSOP: the make.contigs command ends up truncating everything after the _ in the output. Then when I get to the count.seqs command, I get error messages stating I cannot have - in my group names.

I am wondering if can just replace all _ and - in my sequence file names to . (periods). Will that cause any issues in the MiSeq SOP?

Many thanks,
Alyssa

2

You should be fine with anything other than _'s. make.files sets the names of the sample based on everything before the first _. Hyphens aren’t great either, but periods should be fine.

Pat