Week 15: Running nf-core pipelines

Author
Affiliation

Jelmer Poelstra

Published

December 1, 2025



1 Overview

This week, we will mainly cover how you can run a bioinformatics pipeline written in the Nextflow language and developed as part of the nf-core initiative. That will take up the Tuesday meeting and part of Thursday’s. On Thursday, we will also have a brief course recap and Q&A session.

2 Learning goals

Specifically, you will learn:

Lecture A: Running nf-core pipelines

  • Why you may want to use pipelines like those made by the nf-core initiative
  • What the nf-core rnaseq pipeline does, and when you would want to use it
  • How these pipelines can be run with a single command, while they submit jobs to the Slurm scheduler at OSC.
  • The difference between general Nextflow options and pipeline-specific options when running such a pipeline.
  • How to set up inputs and outputs for such a pipeline, including the distinction between a final output dir and a “work dir”.
  • How to monitor pipeline progress
  • How to restart a pipeline run using the -resume option
  • How to find and interpret the output files produced by the pipeline

Lecture B: Course recap

  • An overview of the topics covered in this course
  • Answers to any remaining questions you may have

3 Readings

  • Ewels et al. (2020): “The nf-core framework for community-curated bioinformatics pipelines

4 Further resources

  • Di Tommaso et al. (2017): “Nextflow enables reproducible computational workflows
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References

Di Tommaso, Paolo, Maria Chatzou, Evan W. Floden, Pablo Prieto Barja, Emilio Palumbo, and Cedric Notredame. 2017. “Nextflow enables reproducible computational workflows.” Nature Biotechnology 35 (4): 316–19. https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.3820.
Ewels, Philip A., Alexander Peltzer, Sven Fillinger, Harshil Patel, Johannes Alneberg, Andreas Wilm, Maxime Ulysse Garcia, Paolo Di Tommaso, and Sven Nahnsen. 2020. “The Nf-Core Framework for Community-Curated Bioinformatics Pipelines.” Nature Biotechnology 38 (3): 276–78. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-020-0439-x.