Abstract
Motivation:
RNA 5-methylcytosine (m5C) is a type of post-transcriptional modification that may be involved in numerous biological processes and tumorigenesis. RNA m5C can be profiled at single-nucleotide resolution by high-throughput sequencing of RNA treated with bisulfite (RNA-BisSeq). However, the exploration of transcriptome-wide profile and potential function of m5C in splicing remains to be elucidated due to lack of isoform level m5C quantification tool.
Results:
We developed a computational package to quantify Epitranscriptomal RNA m5C at the transcript isoform level (named Episo). Episo consists of three tools: mapper, quant and Bisulfitefq, for mapping, quantifying and simulating RNA-BisSeq data, respectively. The high accuracy of Episo was validated using an improved m5C-specific methylated RNA immunoprecipitation (meRIP) protocol, as well as a set of in silico experiments. By applying Episo to public human and mouse RNA-BisSeq data, we found that the RNA m5C is not evenly distributed among the transcript isoforms, implying the m5C may subject to be regulated at isoform level.
Availability and implementation:
Episo is released under the GNU GPLv3+ license. The resource code Episo is freely accessible from https://github.com/liujunfengtop/Episo (with Tophat/cufflink) and https://github.com/liujunfengtop/Episo/tree/master/Episo_Kallisto (with Kallisto).
Supplementary information:
Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.