RNACache: Fast Mapping of RNA-Seq Reads to Transcriptomes Using MinHashing

The alignment of reads to a transcriptome is an important initial step in a variety of bioinformatics RNA-seq pipelines. As traditional alignment-based tools suffer from high runtimes, alternative, alignment-free methods have recently gained increasing importance. We present a novel approach to the detection of local similarities between transcriptomes and RNA-seq reads based on context-aware minhashing. We introduce RNACache, a three-step processing pipeline consisting of minhashing of k-mers, match-based (online) filtering, and coverage-based filtering in order to identify truly expressed transcript isoforms. Our performance evaluation shows that RNACache produces transcriptomic mappings …