How to efficiently bulk download NGS data from sequence read databases

This blog post deals with the various ways of downloading large amounts of sequencing data (e.g., from NCBI’s SRA database). When I needed to bulk download short read for a recent project, it took me some time to figure out how to achieve this efficiently, and I am sharing my experience here in the hope it might be useful. 

The problem: you want to download lots of sequencing data (typically in form of Illumina generated reads), e.g., to reproduce a published experiment. The amount of data makes it impossible to click+download through a browser interface. There are two potential solutions: 1) download via NCBI’s SRA toolkit, and 2) access ftp servers directly.  

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