Curse: building expression atlases and co-expression networks from public RNA-Seq data.

Abstract

SUMMARY: Public RNA-Sequencing (RNA-Seq) datasets are a valuable resource for transcriptome analyses, but their accessibility is hindered by the imperfect quality and presentation of their metadata and by the complexity of processing raw sequencing data. The Curse suite was created to alleviate these problems. It consists of an online curation tool named Curse to efficiently build compendia of experiments hosted on the Sequence Read Archive, and a lightweight pipeline named Prose to download and process the RNA-Seq data into expression atlases and co-expression networks. Curse networks showed improved linking of functionally related genes compared to the state-of-the-art. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: Curse, Prose and their manuals are available at http://bioinformatics.psb.ugent.be/webtools/Curse/. Prose was implemented in Java. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.