Barcode identification for single cell genomics

BACKGROUND: Single-cell sequencing experiments use short DNA barcode ‘tags’ to identify reads that originate from the same cell. In order to recover single-cell information from such experiments, reads must be grouped based on their barcode tag, a crucial processing step that precedes other computations. However, this step can be difficult due to high rates of mismatch and deletion errors that can afflict barcodes. RESULTS: Here we present an approach to identify and error-correct barcodes by traversing the de Bruijn graph of circularized barcode k-mers. Our approach is based on the observation that circularizing a barcode sequence can yield error-free k-mers even when the size of k is large relative to the length of the barcode sequence, a regime which is typical single-cell barcoding applications. This allows for assignment of reads to consensus fingerprints constructed from k-mers. CONCLUSION: We show that for single-cell RNA-Seq circularization improves the recovery of accurate single-cell transcriptome estimates, especially when there are a high number of errors per read. This approach is robust to the type of error (mismatch, insertion, deletion), as well as to the relative abundances of the cells. Sircel, a software package that implements this approach is described and publically available. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12859-019-2612-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.