Identification of cell barcodes from long-read single-cell RNA-seq with BLAZE
Yupei You, Yair D. J. Prawer, Ricardo De Paoli‐Iseppi, Cameron P. J. Hunt, Clare L. Parish, Heejung Shim, Michael B. Clark
Abstract
Long-read single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) enables the quantification of RNA isoforms in individual cells. However, long-read scRNA-seq using the Oxford Nanopore platform has largely relied upon matched short-read data to identify cell barcodes. We introduce BLAZE, which accurately and efficiently identifies 10x cell barcodes using only nanopore long-read scRNA-seq data. BLAZE outperforms the existing tools and provides an accurate representation of the cells present in long-read scRNA-seq when compared to matched short reads. BLAZE simplifies long-read scRNA-seq while improving the results, is compatible with downstream tools accepting a cell barcode file, and is available at https://github.com/shimlab/BLAZE .