MPAthic: quantitative modeling of sequence-function relationships for massively parallel assays

Massively parallel assays (MPAs) are being rapidly adopted for studying a wide range of DNA, RNA, and protein sequence-function relationships. However, the software available for quantitatively modeling these relationships is severely limited. Here we describe MPAthic, a software package that enables the rapid inference of such models from a variety of MPA datasets. Using both simulated and previously published data, we show that the modeling capabilities of MPAthic greatly improve on those of existing software. In particular, only MPAthic can accurately quantify the strength of epistatic interactions. These capabilities address a major need in the analysis of MPA data.