Identifying and quantifying isoforms from accurate full-length transcriptome sequencing reads with Mandalorion

Abstract

The Mandalorion tool, which we have continuously developed over the last 5 years, identifies and quantifies high-confidence isoforms from accurate full-length transcriptome sequencing reads produced by methods like PacBio Iso-Seq and ONT-based R2C2. In this manuscript, we introduce and benchmark Mandalorion v4 which further improves upon the already strong performance of Mandalorion v3.6 used in the LRGASP consortium challenge. By processing real and simulated accurate full-length transcriptome sequencing data sets, we show three main features of Mandalorion: First, Mandalorion-based isoform identification has very high Precision and maintains high Recall even when used in the absence of any genome annotation. Second, isoform read counts as quantified by Mandalorion show high correlation with simulated read counts. Third, isoforms identified by Mandalorion closely reflect the full-length transcriptome sequencing data sets they are based on.