IsoformSwitchAnalyzeR: analysis of changes in genome-wide patterns of alternative splicing and its functional consequences

Summary: Alternative splicing is an important mechanism involved in health and disease. Recent work highlights the importance of investigating genome-wide changes in splicing patterns and the subsequent functional consequences. Current computational methods only support such analysis on a gene-by-gene basis. Therefore, we extended IsoformSwitchAnalyzeR R library to enable analysis of genome-wide changes in specific types of alternative splicing and predicted functional consequences of the resulting isoform switches. As a case study, we analyzed RNA-seq data from The Cancer Genome Atlas and found systematic changes in alternative splicing and the consequences of the associated isoform switches.

Availability and implementation: Windows, Linux and Mac OS: http://bioconductor.org/packages/IsoformSwitchAnalyzeR.

Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.