Cutadapt finds and removes adapter sequences, primers, poly-A tails and other types of unwanted sequence from your high-throughput sequencing reads.
Cleaning your data in this way is often required: Reads from small-RNA sequencing contain the 3’ sequencing adapter because the read is longer than the molecule that is sequenced. Amplicon reads start with a primer sequence. Poly-A tails are useful for pulling out RNA from your sample, but often you don’t want them to be in your reads.
Cutadapt helps with these trimming tasks by finding the adapter or primer sequences in an error-tolerant way. It can also modify and filter single-end and paired-end reads in various ways. Adapter sequences can contain IUPAC wildcard characters. Cutadapt can also demultiplex your reads.