TKSM: Highly modular, user-customizable, and scalable transcriptomic sequencing long-read simulator

Abstract

MotivationTranscriptomic long-read (LR) sequencing is an increasingly cost-effective technology for probing various RNA features. Numerous tools have been developed to tackle various transcriptomic sequencing tasks (e.g. isoform and gene fusion detection). However, the lack of abundant gold standard datasets hinders the benchmarking of such tools. Therefore, simulation of LR sequencing is an important and practical alternative to enable the assessment of these tools. While the existing LR simulators aim to imitate the sequencing machine noise and to target specific library protocols, they lack some important library preparation steps (e.g. PCR) and are difficult to modify to new and changing library preparation techniques (e.g. single-cell LRs). ResultsWe present TKSM, a modular and scalable LR simulator. TKSM is designed so that each RNA modification step is targeted explicitly by a software module. This allows the user to assemble a simulation pipeline of any combination of TKSM modules to emulate the sequencing design the user is targeting. Additionally, the input/output of all the core modules of TKSM follow the same simple format (Molecule Description Format) allowing the user to easily extend TKSM with new modules targeting new library preparation steps. AvailabilityTKSM is available as an open source software at https://github.com/vpc-ccg/tksm.