I guess the only answer here is to try to do it!

Yes, it is definitely possible. Bowtie has a very low memory requirement relative to other aligners. 16GB of RAM should be plenty. I've done it on a much older MAC with only 4GB and it completed successfully (though I had to run it for ~48 hours straight, so I highly recommend avoiding this particular set up). How much time it takes depends a lot on your parameters, background CPU usage, etc.... you should perform some benchmarking to figure that out.

As a more general answer to your question, 16GB of RAM will place you solidly in the "maybe" camp when answering the question "Does it have enough power to do ". It is unlikely to be enough to use STAR, more than enough to use Bowtie, way too little to use memory heavy software like Cell Ranger. In general, check the manual of any tool you'd like to use and see what the recommended and required parameters are, and that should tell you whether your set up will work or not.

James Ropa Thanks a lot for answering the question. As you said, some benchmarking is required.. and I completely agree with that. My particular concern is with Apple's M1 chips, I could not find any benchmark figures, where the application of M1 chips is explored in the field of bioinformatics.

Moreover, Apple's new Mac Studio seems to be very powerful but is yet to be tested for running bioinformatics tools. So can devices like M1 ultra mac studio completely wipe the use of bulky workstations?

Again, everything boils down to benchmarking..

I guess its a high time we should do this so that better & energy-efficient machines can be put to use.

Rim Gubaev thanks

Just try and then tell us the result if possible

Just try and then tell us the result if possible

Just try and then tell us the result if possible

Just try and then tell us the result if possible

Just try and then tell us the result if possible

Just try and then tell us the result if possible

Just try and then tell us the result if possible

Just try and then tell us the result if possible

Just try and then tell us the result if possible

Just try and then tell us the result if possible.

Atul Kumar Kashyap

The answer is Yes. Indexing and mapping both are possible in 16 Gb. However, mapping speed will depends how many threads you use. Moreover, it depends also on the genome size. The computational resources seems enough for small genomes. For large genome indexing may take 15 minutes. For mapping (in case RNA ), do not try STAR aligner.

Ranjan Jyoti Sarma thank you.