RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 The impact of amplification on differential expression analyses by RNA-seq
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 035493
DO 10.1101/035493
A1 Swati Parekh
A1 Christoph Ziegenhain
A1 Beate Vieth
A1 Wolfgang Enard
A1 Ines Hellmann
YR 2015
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/12/28/035493.abstract
AB Background Currently quantitative RNA-Seq methods are pushed to work with increasingly small starting amounts of RNA that require PCR amplification to generate libraries. However, it is unclear how much noise or bias amplification introduces and how this effects precision and accuracy of RNA quantification. To assess the effects of amplification, reads that originated from the same RNA molecule (PCR-duplicates) need to be identified. Computationally, read duplicates are defined via their mapping position, which does not distinguish PCR-from natural duplicates that are bound to occur for highly transcribed RNAs. Hence, it is unclear how to treat duplicate reads and how important it is to reduce PCR amplification experimentally.Results Here, we generate and analyse RNA-Seq datasets that were prepared with three different protocols (Smart-Seq, TruSeq and UMI-seq). We find that a large fraction of computationally identified read duplicates can be explained by sampling and fragmentation bias. Consequently, the computational removal of duplicates does not improve accuracy, power or false discovery rates, but can actually worsen them. Even when duplicates are experimentally identified by unique molecular identifiers (UMIs), power and false discovery rate are only mildly improved. However, we do find that power does improve with fewer PCR amplification cycles across datasets and that early barcoding of samples and hence PCR amplification in one reaction can restore this loss of power.Conclusions Computational removal of read duplicates is not recommended for differential expression analysis. However, the pooling of samples as made possible by the early barcoding of the UMI-protocol leads to an appreciable increase in the power to detect differentially expressed genes.