This Drop-seq tool identifies cell barcodes with aberrant “fixed” UMI bases. If only the last UMI base is fixed as a T, the cell barcode is corrected (the last base is trimmed off) and all cell barcodes with identical sequence at the first 11 bases are merged together. If any other UMI base is fixed, the reads with that cell barcode are discarded.
The tool asks the user to select a number of barcodes on which to perform the correction. In the original Drop-seq manual, the tool developers guide users to use roughly 2 times the anticipated number cells, as they have empirically found that this allows to recover nearly every defective cell barcode that corresponds to a STAMP (rather than an empty bead cell barcode).
This program reads in the BAM file, and looks at the distribution of bases at each position of all UMIs for a cell barcode. It detects unusual distributions of base frequency, where a base with >=80% frequency at any position is detected as an error. Barcodes with less than 25 total UMIs are ignored.
For more details, please check the Drop-seq manual.