BCAR: a fast and indel-tolerant barcode-sequence mapper

DNA barcodes are commonly used as a tool to distinguish genuine mutations from sequencing errors in sequencing-based assays. In the presence of indel errors, utilizing barcodes requires accurate alignment of the raw reads to distinguish genuine indels from indel errors. Existing strategies to do this generally rely on aligners built for homology comparison and do not fully utilize quality scores. We reasoned that developing an aligner purpose-built for error correction could yield higher quality barcode-sequence maps.

Here, we present BCAR, a fast barcode-sequence mapper for correcting sequencing errors. BCAR considers all of the evidence for each base call at each position both during alignment and during final consensus generation. BCAR creates high-accuracy barcode-sequence maps from simulated reads across a broad range of error rates and read lengths, outperforming existing methods. We apply BCAR to two experimental datasets, where it generates high-quality barcode-sequence maps.

BCAR source code, documentation, and test data are available from: https://github.com/dry-brews/BCAR or https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20088816.