SOAPdenovo-Trans: De novo transcriptome assembly with short RNA-Seq reads.

Transcriptome sequencing has long been the favored method for quickly and inexpensively obtaining a large number of gene sequences from an organism with no reference genome. Due to the rapid increase in throughputs and decrease in costs of next generation sequencing, RNA-Seq in particular has become the method of choice. However, the very short reads (e.g. 2 × 90 bp paired ends) from next generation sequencing makes de novo assembly to recover complete or full-length transcript sequences an algorithmic challenge.

Here, researchers from BGI Shenzhen, present SOAPdenovo-Trans, a de novo transcriptome assembler designed specifically for RNA-Seq. They evaluated its performance on transcriptome datasets from rice and mouse. Using as their benchmarks the known transcripts from these well-annotated genomes (sequenced a decade ago), they assessed how SOAPdenovo-Trans and two other popular transcriptome assemblers handled such practical issues as alternative splicing and variable expression levels.

rna-seq

AVAILABILITY: Source code and user manual are available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/soapdenovotrans/

Xie Y, Wu G, Tang J, Luo R, Patterson J, Liu S, Huang W, He G, Gu S, Li S, Zhou X, Lam TW, Li Y, Xu X, Wong GK, Wang J. (2014) SOAPdenovo-Trans: De novo transcriptome assembly with short RNA-Seq reads. Bioinformatics [Epub ahead of print]. [abstract]