how are we stranded here: Quick determination of RNA-Seq strandedness

Abstract

Quality control checks are the first step in RNA-Sequencing analysis, which enable the identification of common issues that occur in the sequenced reads. Checks for sequence quality, contamination, and complexity are commonplace, and allow users to implement steps downstream which can account for these issues. Strand-specificity of reads is frequently overlooked and is often unavailable even in published data, yet when unknown or incorrectly specified can have detrimental effects on the reproducibility and accuracy of downstream analyses. We present how_are_we_stranded_here, a Python library that helps to quickly infer strandedness of paired-end RNA-Sequencing data.