miRge3.0: a comprehensive microRNA and tRF sequencing analysis pipeline

MicroRNAs and tRFs are classes of small non-coding RNAs, known for their roles in translational regulation of genes. Advances in next-generation sequencing (NGS) have enabled high-throughput small RNA-seq studies, which require robust alignment pipelines. Our laboratory previously developed miRge and miRge2.0, as flexible tools to process sequencing data for annotation of miRNAs and other small-RNA species and further predict novel miRNAs using a support vector machine approach. Although miRge2.0 is a leading analysis tool in terms of speed with unique quantifying and annotation features, it has a few limitations. We present miRge3.0 that provides additional features along with compatibility to newer versions of Cutadapt and Python. The revisions of the tool include the ability to process Unique Molecular Identifiers (UMIs) to account for PCR duplicates while quantifying miRNAs in the datasets, correct erroneous single base substitutions in miRNAs with miREC and an accurate mirGFF3 formatted isomiR tool. miRge3.0 also has speed improvements benchmarked to miRge2.0, Chimira and sRNAbench. Finally, miRge3.0 output integrates into other packages for a streamlined analysis process and provides a cross-platform Graphical User Interface (GUI). In conclusion miRge3.0 is our third generation small RNA-seq aligner with improvements in speed, versatility and functionality over earlier iterations.