Isoform-level ribosome occupancy estimation guided by transcript abundance with Ribomap

Summary: Ribosome profiling is a recently developed high-throughput sequencing technique that captures approximately 30 bp long ribosome-protected mRNA fragments during translation. Because of alternative splicing and repetitive sequences, a ribosome-protected read may map to many places in the transcriptome, leading to discarded or arbitrary mappings when standard approaches are used. We present a technique and software that addresses this problem by assigning reads to potential origins proportional to estimated transcript abundance. This yields a more accurate estimate of ribosome profiles compared with a naïve mapping. Availability and implementation: Ribomap is available as open source at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/∼ckingsf/software/ribomap. Contact: carlk@cs.cmu.edu Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.