FADU: a Quantification Tool for Prokaryotic Transcriptomic Analyses
Matthew Chung, Ricky S. Adkins, John Mattick, Katie R. Bradwell, Amol C. Shetty, Lisa Sadzewicz, Luke J. Tallon, Claire M. Fraser, David A. Rasko, Anup Mahurkar, Julie C. Dunning Hotopp
Abstract
Most currently available quantification tools for transcriptomics analyses have been designed for human data sets, in which full-length transcript sequences, including the untranslated regions, are well annotated. In most prokaryotic systems, full-length transcript sequences have yet to be characterized, leading to prokaryotic transcriptomics analyses being performed based on only the coding sequences. In contrast to eukaryotes, prokaryotes contain polycistronic transcripts, and when genes are quantified based on coding sequences instead of transcript sequences, this leads to an increased abundance of improperly assigned ambiguous multigene fragments, specifically those mapping to multiple genes in operons. Here, we describe FADU, a quantification tool for prokaryotic RNA-Seq analyses designed to assign proportional counts with the purpose of better quantifying operonic genes while minimizing the pitfalls associated with improperly assigning fragment counts from ambiguous transcripts.