Looking for help joining paired-end reads

Thanks for clarifying, @Hui_Yang!

515F 926R is ~411 nts long. Based on the provenance in the files you shared, your trim and trunc params were:

  • trunc_len_f: 240
  • trim_left_f: 20

That means that the forward reads were trimmed to 220 nts

  • trunc_len_r: 200
  • trim_left_r: 20

That means the reverse reads were trimmed to 180 nts

I think that means there is no way the fwd and rev reads can overlap:

411 nt amplicon |----------------------------------------------|
240 nt fwd read |-------------------------->
200 nt rev read                    <---------------------------|
29 nt overlap                      ^^^^^^^^^

@SoilRotifer, am I doing this math right?

I think you will need to relax your params quite a bit, you need at least 23 nts more to ensure sufficient overlap.