NanoAsPipe: A transcriptome analysis and alternative splicing detection pipeline for MinION long-read RNA-seq

After the next-generation sequencing technology, long-read sequencing technologies were developed. Both the advantages and the drawbacks of long-read sequencing technologies are obvious. Here, we take advantages of long-read sequencing technology, MinION, to develop a comprehensive and user-friendly pipeline, NanoAsPipe, to identify the transcriptomic profiles, isoform profiles, and alternative splicing (AS) events of long-read RNA-seq data on the Open Science Grid (OSG). NanoAsPipe includes RNA-seq data preprocessing, mapping and alternative splicing analysis to simultaneously account for AS events. NanoAsPipe was applied to two long-read datasets and its performance was evaluated by comparing discovered AS events with gene annotation and results from short-read RNA-seq data. Majority of predicted AS events by NanoAsPipe was confirmed by the gene annotation and there is a high correlation between results from long-read data and short-read data. NanoAsPipe was implemented as a software package, which is available for academic research at http://sysbio.unl.edu/NanoAsPipe. The user may run the workflow based on the OSG environment or switch it to other computing setup environments.