BleTIES: Annotation of natural genome editing in ciliates using long read sequencing

Abstract

Summary Ciliates are single-celled eukaryotes that eliminate specific, interspersed DNA sequences (internally eliminated sequences, IESs) from their genomes during development. These are challenging to annotate and assemble because IES-containing sequences are much less abundant in the cell than those without, and IES sequences themselves often contain repetitive and low-complexity sequences. Long read sequencing technologies from Pacific Biosciences and Oxford Nanopore have the potential to reconstruct longer IESs than has been possible with short reads, and also the ability to detect correlations of neighboring element elimination. Here we present BleTIES, a software toolkit for detecting, assembling, and analyzing IESs using mapped long reads. Availability and implementation BleTIES is implemented in Python 3. Source code is available at https://github.com/Swart-lab/bleties (MIT license), and also distributed via Bioconda. Contact Contact: [email protected] Supplementary information Benchmarking of BleTIES with published sequence data.