Dimon MT, Sorber K, DeRisi JL. HMMSplicer: a tool for efficient and sensitive discovery of known and novel splice junctions in RNA-Seq data.
PLoS One 2010;
5:e13875. [PMID:
21079731 PMCID:
PMC2975632 DOI:
10.1371/journal.pone.0013875]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 47] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.4] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/10/2010] [Accepted: 09/16/2010] [Indexed: 02/01/2023] Open
Abstract
Background
High-throughput sequencing of an organism's transcriptome, or RNA-Seq, is a valuable and versatile new strategy for capturing snapshots of gene expression. However, transcriptome sequencing creates a new class of alignment problem: mapping short reads that span exon-exon junctions back to the reference genome, especially in the case where a splice junction is previously unknown.
Methodology/Principal Findings
Here we introduce HMMSplicer, an accurate and efficient algorithm for discovering canonical and non-canonical splice junctions in short read datasets. HMMSplicer identifies more splice junctions than currently available algorithms when tested on publicly available A. thaliana, P. falciparum, and H. sapiens datasets without a reduction in specificity.
Conclusions/Significance
HMMSplicer was found to perform especially well in compact genomes and on genes with low expression levels, alternative splice isoforms, or non-canonical splice junctions. Because HHMSplicer does not rely on pre-built gene models, the products of inexact splicing are also detected. For H. sapiens, we find 3.6% of 3′ splice sites and 1.4% of 5′ splice sites are inexact, typically differing by 3 bases in either direction. In addition, HMMSplicer provides a score for every predicted junction allowing the user to set a threshold to tune false positive rates depending on the needs of the experiment. HMMSplicer is implemented in Python. Code and documentation are freely available at http://derisilab.ucsf.edu/software/hmmsplicer.
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