Hi Lusine,
No, there is not a built-in step for host contamination removal, but doing so is fairly straightforward. If you know your host genome, you could simply run a tool like BWA-MEM, ideally after step 3 (ribodepletion) and before step 4 (annotation against the DIAMOND database). You could add it to the master script at line 222:
https://github.com/transcript/samsa2/blob/master/bash_scripts/master_script.sh
You'd simply get your reference genome and use the bwa mem command to align your sequence fastq against that reference.
With BWA-MEM, you'd get a BAM file that contains both mapped and unmapped reads. You could then use SAMtools to extract the unmapped reads from the BAM, with a command like:
samtools view -f 4 file.bam > unmapped.sam
You'd then simply convert this sam file back into a fastq (this can be done with
Unix command line commands), and then continue on with the rest of the SAMSA2 pipeline as normal.
Best,
Sam