HPC-REDItools: a novel HPC-aware tool for improved large scale RNA-editing analysis

BACKGROUND: RNA editing is a widespread co-/post-transcriptional mechanism that alters primary RNA sequences through the modification of specific nucleotides and it can increase both the transcriptome and proteome diversity. The automatic detection of RNA-editing from RNA-seq data is computational intensive and limited to small data sets, thus preventing a reliable genome-wide characterisation of such process. RESULTS: In this work we introduce HPC-REDItools, an upgraded tool for accurate RNA-editing events discovery from large dataset repositories. Availability: https://github.com/BioinfoUNIBA/REDItools2. CONCLUSIONS: HPC-REDItools is dramatically faster than the previous version, REDItools, enabling big-data analysis by means of a MPI-based implementation and scaling almost linearly with the number of available cores.