Specific splice junction detection in single cells with SICILIAN

Abstract

Precise splice junction calls are currently unavailable in scRNA-seq pipelines such as the 10x Chromium platform but are critical for understanding single-cell biology. Here, we introduce SICILIAN, a new method that assigns statistical confidence to splice junctions from a spliced aligner to improve precision. SICILIANs precise splice detection achieves high accuracy on simulated data, improves concordance between matched single-cell and bulk datasets, increases agreement between biological replicates, and reliably detects un-annotated splicing in single cells, enabling the discovery of novel splicing regulation.