Error displayed while using 'qiime demux summarize' after importing the data

[SAHIL_JAIN_16110144]

I have paired-end demultiplexed 16S rRNA data (fastq files). After importing the data on qiime2, I was running the command 'qiime demux summarize' and the following error shows up:

Plugin error from demux:

'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xb1 in position 4672: invalid start byte

Can anyone explain this error to me? How can I resolve this?

[Nicholas_Bokulich]

Hi @SAHIL_JAIN_16110144,
Sounds like your data are either corrupted or contain invalid sequences. I recommend running qiime tools validate to diagnose the issue, but also check out these posts for nearly identical errors:

Error in paired-end-demux.qza file

I am having some trouble with importing my fastq files for dada2 denoising. I am able to create the "paired-end-demux.qza" file, but get an error message when working with this file. For example, when running "qiime demux summarize" I get the error: " 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xf8 in position 4099: invalid start byte" (full error message is pasted below). I see from the forum that this may have something to do with my manifest file, but I'm out of ideas with what it could be, and my manif…

UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0x8b in position 1: invalid start byte

Hello, I saw there was a similar topic created by somebody but wasn't resolved perhaps. (https://forum.qiime2.org/t/manifest-file-invalid-text-encoding/1827) In my case, I am using a demultiplexed fastq file, which I zipped using gzip, and then tried to import using the following command, but couldn't succeed... qiime tools import --type 'SampleData[SequencesWithQuality]' --input-path ATCC/PGM052_QIIME2.fastq.gz --output-path demux.qza --source-format SingleEndFastqManifestPhred33 Traceback (…