RNAtor – a mobile application for designing RNA-seq experiments

RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) is a powerful technology for identification of novel transcripts (coding, non-coding and splice variants), understanding of transcript structures and estimation of gene and/or allelic expression. There are specific challenges that biologists face in determining the number of replicates to use, total number of sequencing reads to generate for detecting marginally differentially expressed transcripts and the number of lanes in a sequencing flow cell to use for the production of right amount of information. Although past studies attempted answering some of these questions, there is a lack of accessible and biologist-friendly mobile applications to answer these questions. Keeping this in mind, researchers from Ganit Labs, Bio-IT Centre have developed RNAtor, a mobile application for Android platforms, to aid biologists in correctly designing their RNA-seq experiments. The recommendations from RNAtor are based on simulations and real data.

Screen shots of RNAtor mobile application

Availability: The Android version of RNAtor is available on Google Play Store and the code from GitHub (https://github.com/binaypanda/RNAtor).