Systematic benchmarking of statistical methods to assess differential expression of circular RNAs

Circular RNAs (circRNAs) are covalently closed transcripts involved in critical regulatory axes, cancer pathways and disease mechanisms. CircRNA expression measured with RNA-seq has particular characteristics that might hamper the performance of standard biostatistical differential expression assessment methods (DEMs). We compared 38 DEM pipelines configured to fit circRNA expression data’s statistical properties, including bulk RNA-seq, single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) and metagenomics DEMs. The DEMs performed poorly on data sets of typical size. Widely used DEMs, such as DESeq2, edgeR and Limma-Voom, gave scarce results, unreliable predictions or even contravened the expected behaviour with some parameter configurations. Limma-Voom achieved the most consistent performance throughout different benchmark data sets and, as well as SAMseq, reasonably balanced false discovery rate (FDR) and recall rate. Interestingly, a few scRNA-seq DEMs obtained results comparable with the best-performing bulk RNA-seq tools. Almost all DEMs’ performance improved when increasing the number of replicates. CircRNA expression studies require careful design, choice of DEM and DEM configuration. This analysis can guide scientists in selecting the appropriate tools to investigate circRNA differential expression with RNA-seq experiments.