Automated QC Reports with MultiQC

Basic Usage

# Aggregate all QC outputs in directory
multiqc results/ -o qc_report/

# Specify output name
multiqc results/ -n my_project_qc

# Include specific tools only
multiqc results/ --module fastqc --module star

Supported Tools

MultiQC recognizes outputs from 100+ bioinformatics tools:

Configuration

Create multiqc_config.yaml:

title: "RNA-seq QC Report"
subtitle: "Project XYZ"
intro_text: "QC metrics for all samples"

# Custom sample name cleaning
extra_fn_clean_exts:
  - '.sorted'
  - '.dedup'

# Report sections to include
module_order:
  - fastqc
  - star
  - featurecounts

# Highlight samples
table_cond_formatting_rules:
  pct_mapped:
    fail: [{lt: 50}]
    warn: [{lt: 70}]

Custom Data

# Add custom data file
# File format: sample\tmetric1\tmetric2
multiqc results/ --data-format tsv --custom-data-file custom_metrics.tsv

Python API

from multiqc import run as multiqc_run

# Run programmatically
multiqc_run(analysis_dir='results/', outdir='qc_report/')

Related Skills

• read-qc/quality-reports - Generate input FastQC reports
• read-qc/fastp-workflow - Preprocessing QC
• workflows/rnaseq-to-de - Full workflow with QC