Necklace: combining reference and assembled transcriptomes for more comprehensive RNA-Seq analysis

Abstract

Background RNA-Seq analyses can benefit from performing a genome-guided and de novo assembly, in particular for species where the reference genome or the annotation is incomplete. However, tools for integrating assembled transcriptome with reference annotation are lacking. Findings Necklace is a software pipeline that runs genome-guided and de novo assembly and combines the resulting transcriptomes with reference genome annotations. Necklace constructs a compact but comprehensive superTranscriptome out of the assembled and reference data. Reads are subsequently aligned and counted in preparation for differential expression testing. Conclusions Necklace allows a comprehensive transcriptome to..