Improved transcriptome quantification and reconstruction from RNA-Seq reads using partial annotations

The paper addresses the problem of how to use RNA-Seq data for transcriptome reconstruction and quantification, as well as novel transcript discovery in partially annotated genomes. We present a novel annotation-guided general framework for transcriptome discovery, reconstruction and quantification in partially annotated genomes and compare it with existing annotation-guided and genome-guided transcriptome assembly methods. Our method, referred as Discovery and Reconstruction of Unannotated Transcripts (DRUT), can be used to enhance existing transcriptome assemblers, such as Cufflinks [3], as well as to accurately estimate the transcript frequencies. Empirical analysis on synthetic datasets confirms that Cufflinks enhanced by DRUT has superior quality of reconstruction and frequency estimation of transcripts.