Pore-C Pipeline-Toolbox: a comprehensive pipeline for Pore-C data analysis

Three-dimensional (3D) genomic architecture is crucial for the regulation of different biological processes, and the study of multi-way chromatin structures represents a cutting-edge area in this field. Pore-C is an advanced experimental technique integrating chromosome conformation capture (3C) with Nanopore long-read sequencing, which can effectively capture complex multi-way chromatin contacts across the genome. Due to the absence of comprehensive and dedicated tools, the analysis of Pore-C data remains challenging, restricting its broader application. To address this limitation, we developed Pore-C Pipeline Toolbox (PPL-Toolbox), a specialized software for a comprehensive analysis of multi-way chromatin interactions from Pore-C data. PPL-Toolbox incorporates a suite of optimized modules, including quality control, multi-way interaction extraction, noise reduction for multi-way contacts, advanced visualization tools for multi-way contacts, and haplotype map generation. Evaluation on both simulated and real datasets demonstrates that the PPL-Toolbox outperforms existing methods by providing a more comprehensive set of results. PPL-Toolbox is expected to become a powerful and versatile tool, driving advance in multi-way 3D genomics research, and enabling new discoveries in the field. PPL-Toolbox is publicly available on GitHub (https://github.com/versarchey/PPL-Toolbox).