CircRNAwrap – a flexible pipeline for circRNA identification, transcript prediction, and abundance estimation

Abstract

Circular RNA (circRNA) is a recently described RNA molecule formed by backsplicing, with the 3′ and 5′ ends linked covalently. The study of circRNAs using RNA-Seq data enables the analysis of genome-wide endogenous circular transcripts. Although several algorithms for circRNA analysis have been developed, they have thus far had limited application. Additionally, approaches for prediction and validation of the composition of exons in circRNAs are still being developed. In this study, we measured the effectiveness of existing tools on collected and simulated data. Furthermore, we carried out a wide-ranging study of circRNA workflows, which we named circRNAwrap. Application of circRNAwrap on the included datasets reveals that our novel protocol can assist researchers in the study of circRNA biology.