Identification of lncRNAs involved in response to ionizing radiation in fibroblasts of long-term survivors of childhood cancer and cancer-free controls

In comparative high-throughput sequencing assays, a fundamental task is the analysis of count data, such as read counts per gene in RNA-seq, for evidence of systematic changes across experimental conditions. Small replicate numbers, discreteness, large dynamic range and the presence of outliers require a suitable statistical approach. We present DESeq2, a method for differential analysis of count data, using shrinkage estimation for dispersions and fold changes to improve stability and interpretability of estimates. This enables a more quantitative analysis focused on the strength rather than the mere presence of differential expression. The DESeq2 package is available at http://www.bioconductor.org/packages/release/bioc/html/DESeq2.html. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13059-014-0550-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Motivation: Although many next-generation sequencing (NGS) read preprocessing tools already existed, we could not find any tool or combination of tools that met our requirements in terms of flexibility, correct handling of paired-end data and high performance. We have developed Trimmomatic as a more flexible and efficient preprocessing tool, which could correctly handle paired-end data. Results: The value of NGS read preprocessing is demonstrated for both reference-based and reference-free tasks. Trimmomatic is shown to produce output that is at least competitive with, and in many cases superior to, that produced by other tools, in all scenarios tested. Availability and implementation: Trimmomatic is licensed under GPL V3. It is cross-platform (Java 1.5+ required) and available at http://www.usadellab.org/cms/index.php?page=trimmomatic Contact: usadel@bio1.rwth-aachen.de Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.