RNAtor: an Android-based application for biologists to plan RNA sequencing experiments

Abstract

RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) is a powerful technology for identification of novel transcripts (coding, non-coding and splice variants), understanding of transcript structures and estimation of gene and/or allelic expression. There are specific challenges that biologists face in determining the number of replicates to use, total number of sequencing reads to generate for detecting marginally differentially expressed transcripts and the number of lanes in a sequencing flow cell to use for the production of right amount of information. Although past studies attempted answering some of these questions, there is a lack of accessible and biologist-friendly mobile applications to answer these questions. Keeping this in mind, we have developed RNAtor, a mobile application for Android platforms, to aid biologists in correctly designing their RNA-seq experiments. The recommendations from RNAtor are based on simulations and real data.