SLIDR and SLOPPR: flexible identification of spliced leader trans -splicing and prediction of eukaryotic operons from RNA-Seq data

Background Spliced leader (SL) trans -splicing replaces the 5′ end of pre-mRNAs with the spliced leader, an exon derived from a specialised non-coding RNA originating from elsewhere in the genome. This process is essential for resolving polycistronic pre-mRNAs produced by eukaryotic operons into monocistronic transcripts. SL trans -splicing and operons may have independently evolved multiple times throughout Eukarya, yet our understanding of these phenomena is limited to only a few well-characterised organisms, most notably C. elegans and trypanosomes. The primary barrier to systematic discovery and characterisation of SL trans -splicing and operons is the lack of computational tools for exploiting the surge of transcriptomic and genomic resources for a wide range of eukaryotes. Results Here we present two novel pipelines that automate the discovery of SLs and the prediction of operons in eukaryotic genomes from RNA-Seq data. SLIDR assembles putative SLs from 5′ read tails present after read alignment to a reference genome or transcriptome, which are then verified by interrogating corresponding SL RNA genes for sequence motifs expected in bona fide SL RNA molecules. SLOPPR identifies RNA-Seq reads that contain a given 5′ SL sequence, quantifies genome-wide SL trans -splicing events and predicts operons via distinct patterns of SL trans -splicing events across adjacent genes. We tested both pipelines with organisms known to carry out SL trans -splicing and organise their genes into operons, and demonstrate that (1) SLIDR correctly detects expected SLs and often discovers novel SL variants; (2) SLOPPR correctly identifies functionally specialised SLs, correctly predicts known operons and detects plausible novel operons. Conclusions SLIDR and SLOPPR are flexible tools that will accelerate research into the evolutionary dynamics of SL trans -splicing and operons throughout Eukarya and improve gene discovery and annotation for a wide range of eukaryotic genomes. Both pipelines are implemented in Bash and R and are built upon readily available software commonly installed on most bioinformatics servers. Biological insight can be gleaned even from sparse, low-coverage datasets, implying that an untapped wealth of information can be retrieved from existing RNA-Seq datasets as well as from novel full-isoform sequencing protocols as they become more widely available.