bcSeq: an R package for fast sequence mapping in high-throughput shRNA and CRISPR screens.

Abstract

CRISPR-Cas9 and shRNA high-throughput sequencing screens have abundant applications for basic and translational research. Methods and tools for the analysis of these screens must properly account for sequencing error, resolve ambiguous mappings among similar sequences in the barcode library in a statistically principled manner, and be computationally efficient. Herein we present bcSeq, an open source R package that implements a fast and parallelized algorithm for mapping high-throughput sequencing reads to a barcode library while tolerating sequencing error. The algorithm uses a Trie data structure for speed and resolves ambiguous mappings by using a statistical sequencing error model based on Phred scores for each read. The package source code and an accompanying tutorial are available at http://bioconductor.org/packages/bcSeq/. Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.