RustQC

Fast genomics quality control tools for sequencing data, written in Rust

RustQC is a suite of fast QC tools for sequencing data, compiled to a single static binary with no runtime dependencies. It reimplements a collection of widely-used bioinformatics QC tools in Rust, producing format- and numerically-identical outputs whilst running dramatically faster.

The first release focuses on RNA-seq QC. A single rustqc rna command runs the equivalent of dupRadar, featureCounts, preseq, Qualimap, samtools and a suite of RSeQC tools in one pass. On a large paired-end RNA-seq BAM, RustQC finishes in around 15 minutes — compared with over 15 hours to run the upstream tools sequentially.

RustQC was developed at Seqera as a practical demonstration of the principles behind rewrites.bio: modernising foundational bioinformatics tools with the help of AI coding assistants, whilst keeping the original authors’ science intact. All outputs are validated against the upstream tools and remain compatible with MultiQC for reporting.

It is designed to slot into the nf-core/rnaseq pipeline, but works anywhere — just run rustqc rna sample.bam --gtf genes.gtf --outdir results/.

For more information, see the RustQC documentation and source code on GitHub.