Xenome--a tool for classifying reads from xenograft samples.

Abstract

Shotgun sequence read data derived from xenograft material contains a mixture of reads arising from the host and reads arising from the graft. Classifying the read mixture to separate the two allows for more precise analysis to be performed. We present a technique, with an associated tool Xenome, which performs fast, accurate and specific classification of xenograft-derived sequence read data. We have evaluated it on RNA-Seq data from human, mouse and human-in-mouse xenograft datasets. Xenome is available for non-commercial use from http://www.nicta.com.au/bioinformatics.