AuPairWise: A Method to Estimate RNA-Seq Replicability through Co-expression
RNA-sequencing has become a popular means to detect the expression levels of genes. However, quality control is still challenging, requiring both extreme measures and rules which are set in stone from extensive previous analysis. Instead of relying on these rules, we show that co-expression can be used to measure biological replicability with extremely high precision. Co-expression is a well-studied phenomenon in which two genes that are known to form a functional unit are also expressed at similar levels, and change in similar ways across conditions. Using this concept, we can detect how well an experiment replicates by measuring how well it has retained the co-expression pattern across defined gene-pairs. We do this by measuring how easy it is to detect a sample to which some noise has been added. We show this method is a useful tool for quality control.

https://github.com/gillislab/AuPairWise

Ballouz, S., Gillis, J. (April 2016) AuPairWise: A Method to Estimate RNA-Seq Replicability through Co-expression. PLoS Comput Biol, 12 (4). e1004868. ISSN 1553-7358 (Electronic)1553-734X (Linking)