PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Alyssa C. Frazee AU - Andrew E. Jaffe AU - Ben Langmead AU - Jeffrey T. Leek TI - <em>Polyester</em>: simulating RNA-seq datasets with differential transcript expression AID - 10.1101/006015 DP - 2014 Jan 01 TA - bioRxiv PG - 006015 4099 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2014/06/06/006015.short 4100 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2014/06/06/006015.full AB - Statistical methods development for differential expression analysis of RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) requires software tools to assess accuracy and error rate control. Since true differential expression status is often unknown in experimental datasets, artificially-constructed datasets must be utilized, either by generating costly spike-in experiments or by simulating RNA-seq data. Polyester is an R package designed to simulate RNA-seq data, beginning with an experimental design and ending with collections of RNA-seq reads. The main advantage of Polyester is the ability to simulate isoform-level differential expression across biological replicates for a variety of experimental designs at the read level. Differential expression signal can be simulated with either built-in or user-defined statistical models. Polyester is available on GitHub at https://github.com/alyssafrazee/polyester.