How to set --outBAMsortingBinsN 200 in RNA STARSolo

Hi!

I have been trying to run RNA STARsolo on each of four single cell RNA-Seq fastq files from the same experiment.

(see als: STARsolo runs out of memory on the BAM sorting step)

All of them fail to align except for one. Each one fails with an error message that says:

“EXITING because of fatal ERROR: not enough memory for BAM sorting”

A post on the STAR github site (not enough memory for BAM sorting · Issue #870 · alexdobin/STAR · GitHub) says they were able to solve the same problem by changing a sorting parameter:

You can try to increase --outBAMsortingBinsN from the default 50 to 100 or even 200, though it will require a large number of open files.
It seems like there a few loci that are very highly expressed, which STAR sorting cannot deal nicely with… So it may be a safer option to use the samtools sort.

Is there a way that I can change --outBAMsortingBinsN?

  • Ann Loraine