rna_cd

Human DNA-seq experiments may be contaminated with RNA. This usually negatively influences downstream analysis. For example, it can introduce false positive variants around splice sites, suppress alternative alleles due to allele-specific expression, and alter coverage patterns which may then influence CNV calling. Moreover, it is typically hard to detect.

Modern Illumina sequencers unfortunately are more prone to such contamination, as the very large capacity of novaseq sequencers typically means multiple projects are sequenced on the same flowcells. Combined with the increased risk of index hopping in novaseq sequencers, this alltogether means that cross-contamination of samples is more likely - including contamination of RNA into DNA-seq experiments.

rna_cd is a python package and command line tool designed to detect such RNA contamination of DNA-seq experiments. It uses the altered coverage and softclip patterns in contaminated samples to train a Support Vector Machine that can classify BAM files into contaminated (“positive”) and uncontaminated (“negative”) groups.

rna_cd stands for RNA contamination detector.

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