COMPASS: a COMprehensive Platform for smAll RNA-Seq data analySis

Abstract

25Background 26Circulating RNAs are potential disease biomarkers and their function is being actively 27 investigated. Next generation sequencing (NGS) is a common means to interrogate 28 the small RNA'ome or the full spectrum of small RNAs (<200 nucleotide length) of a 29 biological system. A pivotal problem in NGS based small RNA analysis is identifying 30 and quantifying the small RNA'ome constituent components. Most existing NGS data 31 analysis tools focus on the microRNA component and a few other small RNA types 32 like piRNA, snRNA and snoRNA. A comprehensive platform is needed to interrogate 33 the full small RNA'ome, a prerequisite for down-stream data analysis. 34 35 Results 36 We present COMPASS, a comprehensive modular stand-alone platform for 37 identifying and quantifying small RNAs from small RNA sequencing data. 38 COMPASS contains prebuilt customizable standard RNA databases and sequence 39 processing tools to enable turnkey basic small RNA analysis. We evaluated 40 COMPASS against comparable existing tools on small RNA sequencing data set from 41 serum samples of 12 healthy human controls, and COMPASS identified a greater 42 diversity and abundance of small RNA molecules. 43 44 Conclusion 45 COMPASS is modular, stand-alone and integrates multiple customizable RNA 46 databases and sequence processing tool and is distributed under the GNU General 47 Li Page 3 COMPASS https://regepi.bwh.harvard.edu/circurna/ and the source code is available at 49 https://github.com/cougarlj/COMPASS. 50 51 Keywords 52 Small RNA-Seq, circulating RNA, extracellular RNA, miRNA, RNA identification, 53 RNA quantification 54 55