COMPASS: a COMprehensive Platform for smAll RNA-Seq data analySis

BackgroundCirculating RNAs are potential disease biomarkers and their function is being actively investigated. Next generation sequencing (NGS) is a common means to interrogate the small RNAome or the full spectrum of small RNAs (<200 nucleotide length) of a biological system. A pivotal problem in NGS based small RNA analysis is identifying and quantifying the small RNAome constituent components. Most existing NGS data analysis tools focus on the microRNA component and a few other small RNA types like piRNA, snRNA and snoRNA. A comprehensive platform is needed to interrogate the full small RNAome, a prerequisite for down-stream data analysis.\n\nResultsWe present COMPASS, a comprehensive modular stand-alone platform for identifying and quantifying small RNAs from small RNA sequencing data. COMPASS contains prebuilt customizable standard RNA databases and sequence processing tools to enable turnkey basic small RNA analysis. We evaluated COMPASS against comparable existing tools on small RNA sequencing data set from serum samples of 12 healthy human controls, and COMPASS identified a greater diversity and abundance of small RNA molecules.\n\nConclusionCOMPASS is modular, stand-alone and integrates multiple customizable RNA databases and sequence processing tool and is distributed under the GNU General Public License free to non-commercial registered users at https://regepi.bwh.harvard.edu/circurna/ and the source code is available at https://github.com/cougarlj/COMPASS.