YODEL: Peak calling software for HITS-CLIP data

Abstract

YODEL is a peak calling software for analyzing RNA sequencing data generated by High-Throughput Sequencing of RNA isolated by Crosslinking Immunoprecipitation (HITS-CLIP; also known as CLIP-SEQ), a method to identify RNA-protein interactions genome-wide. We designed YODEL to analyze HITS-CLIP experiments, in which Argonaute proteins are immunoprecipitated, followed by sequencing of the associated RNA in order to identify bound microRNAs and their mRNA targets. The HITS-CLIP sequenced reads are mapped to the genome, and then read peaks are visualized where clustered sets of reads map to the same region. Several peak calling algorithms have been developed to define the boundaries of these peaks. In contrast to other peak callers for HITS-CLIP data, such as Piranha, YODEL does not map the starts of reads to fixed interval bins, but instead uses a heuristic approach to iteratively find the tallest point within a set clustered reads and examine bases upstream and downstream of that point until a peak has been determined. This allows the peak boundary to be defined more precisely than coordinates that are multiples of the bin size. Per-sample peak counts are also generated by YODEL, which quickly enables downstream differential representation analysis. YODEL is available at https://github.com/LancePalmerStJude/YODEL/ .