Syotti: scalable bait design for DNA enrichment.

MOTIVATION: Bait enrichment is a protocol that is becoming increasingly ubiquitous as it has been shown to successfully amplify regions of interest in metagenomic samples. In this method, a set of synthetic probes ('baits') are designed, manufactured and applied to fragmented metagenomic DNA. The probes bind to the fragmented DNA and any unbound DNA is rinsed away, leaving the bound fragments to be amplified for sequencing. Metsky et al. demonstrated that bait-enrichment is capable of detecting a large number of human viral pathogens within metagenomic samples. RESULTS: We formalize the problem of designing baits by defining the Minimum Bait Cover problem, show that the problem is NP-hard even under very restrictive assumptions, and design an efficient heuristic that takes advantage of succinct data structures. We refer to our method as Syotti. The running time of Syotti shows linear scaling in practice, running at least an order of magnitude faster than state-of-the-art methods, including the method of Metsky et al. At the same time, our method produces bait sets that are smaller than the ones produced by the competing methods, while also leaving fewer positions uncovered. Lastly, we show that Syotti requires only 25 min to design baits for a dataset comprised of 3 billion nucleotides from 1000 related bacterial substrains, whereas the method of Metsky et al. shows clearly super-linear running time and fails to process even a subset of 17% of the data in 72 h. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: https://github.com/jnalanko/syotti. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

SeeSite: Characterizing Relationships between Splice Junctions and Splicing Enhancers.

RNA splicing is a cellular process driven by the interaction between numerous regulatory sequences and binding sites, however, such interactions have been primarily explored by laboratory methods since computational tools largely ignore the relationship between different splicing elements. Current computational methods identify either splice sites or other regulatory sequences, such as enhancers and silencers. We present a novel approach for characterizing co-occurring relationships between splice site motifs and splicing enhancers. Our approach relies on an efficient algorithm for approximately solving Consensus Sequence with Outliers , an NP-complete string clustering problem. In particular, we give an algorithm for this problem that outputs near-optimal solutions in polynomial time. To our knowledge, this is the first formulation and computational attempt for detecting co-occurring sequence elements in RNA sequence data. Further, we demonstrate that SeeSite is capable of showing that certain ESEs are preferentially associated with weaker splice sites, and that there exists a co-occurrence relationship with splice site motifs.