The R package Rsubread is easier, faster, cheaper and better for alignment and quantification of RNA sequencing reads

Abstract

We present Rsubread, a Bioconductor software package that provides high-performance alignment and read counting functions for RNA-seq reads. Rsubread is based on the successful Subread suite with the added ease-of-use of the R programming environment, creating a matrix of read counts directly as an R object ready for downstream analysis. It integrates read mapping and quantification in a single package and has no software dependencies other than R itself. We demonstrate Rsubread's ability to detect exon-exon junctions de novo and to quantify expression at the level of either genes, exons or exon junctions. The resulting read counts can be input directly into a wide range of downstream statis..