Hello,

somehow the scanBam function does not properly read in the mapq scores from this file:

HWI-ST227:407:C56MLACXX:1:1316:6877:64103    0    chr10    3153911    255    24M    *    0    0    CCCAATTAATGGGGGCAGGATAAG    HFHGHI@DAEI@GGIDEBGFGHHG    NH:i:1    HI:i:1    AS:i:19    nM:i:2
HWI-ST227:407:C56MLACXX:1:2102:2752:79037    0    chr10    3153911    255    24M    *    0    0    CCCAATTAATGGGGGCAGGATAAG    HGIJJIIJJIGHIJJJIJJIJJIG    NH:i:1    HI:i:1    AS:i:19    nM:i:2
HWI-ST227:407:C56MLACXX:1:2113:3448:85785    0    chr10    3175788    255    24M    *    0    0    TCTTTTAGATCTATTTACTCTGGA    ########################    NH:i:1    HI:i:1    AS:i:19    nM:i:2
HWI-ST227:407:C56MLACXX:1:1203:13148:73589    16    chr10    3180818    255    24M    *    0    0    TAGGCTTCAAGGAGAGTCTCCTGT    ?DBEIIEDD?99>C@DEEE9FFC4    NH:i:1    HI:i:1    AS:i:23    nM:i:0

They all should be 255 but are read in as NA.

The code I used was just:

scanBam("test.bam")[[1]]$mapq

[1] NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA
[34] NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA

What could be the reason for this?

Best regards,

Felix

PS: How could I provide the test.bam file for testing?

It's an intentional (maybe misguided?) interpretation of the SAM spec,

5. MAPQ: MAPping Quality. It equals −10 log10 Pr{mapping position is wrong},
   rounded to the nearest integer. A value 255 indicates that the mapping
   quality is not available.

translating the magic number '255' to the R representation 'NA'.