TRAL: tandem repeat annotation library

Bioinformatics. 2015 Sep 15;31(18):3051-3. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btv306. Epub 2015 May 18.

Abstract

Motivation: Currently, more than 40 sequence tandem repeat detectors are published, providing heterogeneous, partly complementary, partly conflicting results.

Results: We present TRAL, a tandem repeat annotation library that allows running and parsing of various detection outputs, clustering of redundant or overlapping annotations, several statistical frameworks for filtering false positive annotations, and importantly a tandem repeat annotation and refinement module based on circular profile hidden Markov models (cpHMMs). Using TRAL, we evaluated the performance of a multi-step tandem repeat annotation workflow on 547 085 sequences in UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot. The researcher can use these results to predict run-times for specific datasets, and to choose annotation complexity accordingly.

Availability and implementation: TRAL is an open-source Python 3 library and is available, together with documentation and tutorials via http://www.vital-it.ch/software/tral.

Contact: elke.schaper@isb-sib.ch.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Amino Acid Sequence
  • Cluster Analysis
  • Databases, Protein*
  • Documentation
  • Gene Library
  • Humans
  • Knowledge Bases*
  • Molecular Sequence Annotation*
  • Molecular Sequence Data
  • Software*
  • Tandem Repeat Sequences / genetics*