Samtools

Easy bam downsampling

When you have a set of ChIP-seq (like) files, it is sometimes useful to downsample the larger samples to more closely match most of the samples. Tommy Tang goes into more detail in his blog post. Unfortunately the tool suites I use most for bam files (samtools and picard) only downsample to a percentage. Which isn’t ideal when you want your files to be no more than n reads. This post is just a slight one-upping of Tommy Tang’s process to easily downsample a bam.