Publication Date:
2015-12-18
Description:
Motivation: Discovery of novel splicing from RNA sequence data remains a critical and exciting focus of transcriptomics, but reduced alignment power impedes expression quantification of novel splice junctions. Results: Here, we profile performance characteristics of two-pass alignment, which separates splice junction discovery from quantification. Per sample, across a variety of transcriptome sequencing datasets, two-pass alignment improved quantification of at least 94% of simulated novel splice junctions, and provided as much as 1.7-fold deeper median read depth over those splice junctions. We further demonstrate that two-pass alignment works by increasing alignment of reads to splice junctions by short lengths, and that potential alignment errors are readily identifiable by simple classification. Taken together, two-pass alignment promises to advance quantification and discovery of novel splicing events. Contact: arul@med.umich.edu , nesvi@med.umich.edu Availability and implementation: Two-pass alignment was implemented here as sequential alignment, genome indexing, and re-alignment steps with STAR. Full parameters are provided in Supplementary Table 2 . Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Print ISSN:
1367-4803
Electronic ISSN:
1460-2059
Topics:
Biology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
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