Extract single chromosome reads from BAM/SAM

Sometimes it is required to extract subset of reads for only one specific chromosome.
It's rather easy to accomplish this task with SAMtools.

First we create the index for a BAM file. It is required for random region positioning.

samtools index accepted_hits.bam

Then we extract the data for specific region, for example chromosome 20.

samtools view -h accepted_hits.bam chr20 > accepted_hits.20.sam