Extracting one chromosome from a FASTA file with sed

You’ve downloaded your favorite (plant) genome, but you’d only want to have chromosome 1 for instance. Let’s suppose you’re working on tomato so you’d need to extract everything between SL4.0chr01 and SL4.0chr02.

  1. If you’re on Mac OS X, install gnu-sed with brew install gnu-sed.
  2. Then all you have to do is: gsed -n '/SL4.0ch01/,/SL4.0ch02/p' ~/Downloads/S_lycopersicum_chromosomes.4.00.fa > S_lycopersicum_chromosomes.4.00.chrom1.fa

You then have to remove the >SL4.0ch02 at the end of your fasta file.

You can do it programmatically with ```head -n $(( $(wc -l S_lycopersicum_chromosomes.4.00.chrom1.fa awk ‘{print $1}’) - 1 )) S_lycopersicum_chromosomes.4.00.chrom1.fa > S_lycopersicum_chromosomes.4.00.chrom1.fa``
Written on March 11, 2019