I'm wondering if I can use some of the nft-plugins in straight up NF. I'm working on the viral hackathon, specifically on https://github.com/maltesie/vjdb-clustering/tree/main This pipeline uses python to generate an md5 hash of sequences given in FASTA format. I was wondering if I could turn that step into pure NF code, and would that be faster/slower and more/less efficient. I can see that nf-test plugin for fasta allows reading the sequencehttps://www.nf-test.com/docs/assertions/fasta/, hence my question Thank you!

Hi there are also Nextflow plugins that exactly suite your need: https://registry.nextflow.io/plugins. There probably is one you could use that already exists, otherwise you can easily write one yourself. However reading actual data files using Nextflow is generally discouraged and should normally be handled by processes (there are of course some exceptions, but that's the general rule of thumb)

Thank you. Okay - it seems that there are no FASTA plugins, and that we shouldn't do it in Nextflow anyway (based on your second paragraph). So I'll just leave it as python for now.