Development of DNA markers that distinguish male and female haploid germlings of the brown alga, Cladosiphon okamuranus

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. Show more

Background Sequence similarity searching is a very important bioinformatics task. While Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) outperforms exact methods through its use of heuristics, the speed of the current BLAST software is suboptimal for very long queries or database sequences. There are also some shortcomings in the user-interface of the current command-line applications. Results We describe features and improvements of rewritten BLAST software and introduce new command-line applications. Long query sequences are broken into chunks for processing, in some cases leading to dramatically shorter run times. For long database sequences, it is possible to retrieve only the relevant parts of the sequence, reducing CPU time and memory usage for searches of short queries against databases of contigs or chromosomes. The program can now retrieve masking information for database sequences from the BLAST databases. A new modular software library can now access subject sequence data from arbitrary data sources. We introduce several new features, including strategy files that allow a user to save and reuse their favorite set of options. The strategy files can be uploaded to and downloaded from the NCBI BLAST web site. Conclusion The new BLAST command-line applications, compared to the current BLAST tools, demonstrate substantial speed improvements for long queries as well as chromosome length database sequences. We have also improved the user interface of the command-line applications. Show more

We introduce Salmon, a method for quantifying transcript abundance from RNA-seq reads that is accurate and fast. Salmon is the first transcriptome-wide quantifier to correct for fragment GC content bias, which we demonstrate substantially improves the accuracy of abundance estimates and the reliability of subsequent differential expression analysis. Salmon combines a new dual-phase parallel inference algorithm and feature-rich bias models with an ultra-fast read mapping procedure. Show more