Xenomake: a pipeline for processing and sorting xenograft reads from spatial transcriptomic experiments.

Abstract

Xenograft models are attractive models that mimic human tumor biology and permit one to perturb the tumor microenvironment and study its drug response. Spatially resolved transcriptomics (SRT) provides a powerful way to study the organization of xenograft models, but currently there is a lack of specialized pipeline for processing xenograft reads originated from SRT experiments. Xenomake is a standalone pipeline for the automated handling of spatial xenograft reads. Xenomake handles read processing, alignment, xenograft read sorting, and connects well with downstream spatial analysis packages. We additionally show that Xenomake can correctly assign organism-specific reads, reduce sparsity of data by increasing gene counts, while maintaining biological relevance for studies. Xenomake is an open-source program that is available on Github (https://github.com/qianzhulab/Xenomake). Complete documentation can be found at the link.