Background: De novo RNA-Seq assembly is a powerful method for analysing transcriptomes when the reference genome is not available or poorly annotated. However, due to the short length of Illumina reads it is usually impossible to reconstruct complete sequences of complex genes and alternative isoforms. Recently emerged possibility to generate long RNA reads, such as PacBio and Oxford Nanopores, may dramatically improve the assembly quality, and thus the consecutive analysis. While reference-based tools for analysing long RNA reads were recently developed, there is no established pipeline for de novo assembly of such data. Results: In this work we present a novel method that allows to perform high-quality de novo transcriptome assemblies by combining accuracy and reliability of short reads with exon structure information carried out from long error-prone reads. The algorithm is designed by incorporating existing hybridSPAdes approach into rnaSPAdes pipeline and adapting it for transcriptomic data. Conclusion: To evaluate the benefit of using long RNA reads we selected several datasets containing both Illumina and Iso-seq or Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) reads. Using an existing quality assessment software, we show that hybrid assemblies performed with rnaSPAdes contain more full-length genes and alternative isoforms comparing to the case when only short-read data is used.

Original languageEnglish
Article number302
Pages (from-to)302
Number of pages9
JournalBMC Bioinformatics
Volume21
Issue numberSuppl 12
DOIs
StatePublished - 24 Jul 2020

    Scopus subject areas

  • Applied Mathematics
  • Molecular Biology
  • Structural Biology
  • Biochemistry
  • Computer Science Applications

    Research areas

  • Algorithms, Databases, Genetic, Humans, MCF-7 Cells, Nanopores, RNA-Seq, Reproducibility of Results, Transcriptome/genetics, Iso-seq, De novo assembly, Oxford nanopores, QUALITY ASSESSMENT, Transcriptome assembly, Transcriptomics, Hybrid assembly

ID: 61160726