BRAT-nova: fast and accurate mapping of bisulfite-treated reads

In response to increasing amounts of sequencing data, faster and faster aligners need to become available. Here, we introduce BRAT-nova, a completely rewritten and improved implementation of the mapping tool BRAT-BW for bisulfite-treated reads (BS-Seq). BRAT-nova is very fast and accurate. On the human genome, BRAT-nova is 2-7 times faster than state-of-the-art aligners, while maintaining the same percentage of uniquely mapped reads and space usage. On synthetic reads, BRAT-nova is 2-8 times faster than state-of-the-art aligners while maintaining similar mapping accuracy, methylation call accuracy, methylation level accuracy and space efficiency.

The software is available in the public domain at http://compbio.cs.ucr.edu/brat/

elenah@cs.ucr.edu

Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.