The BUS Format for Single-Cell RNA-Seq Processing and Analysis

Abstract

The Barcode-UMI-Set format (BUS) is a recently developed format for representing pseudoalignments of reads from single-cell RNA-seq experiments. The format can be used with most single-cell RNA-seq technologies, can be generated efficiently, and allows for development of modular and robust workflows for processing and analysis of single-cell RNA-seq reads. To demonstrate the utility of BUS, we processed 381,992,071 single-cell RNA-Seq reads from a 1:1 mixture of fresh frozen human cells (HEK293T) and mouse cells (NIH3T3) produced with 10x technology and hosted on the 10x Genomics website. The generation of BUS format using a new command in the kallisto program took 984 seconds for this data (in comparison with 55,745 seconds with the 10x Genomics CellRanger software). I will present results showing that this workflow not only produces comparable results to the existing standard workflow, but is flexible and useful for many other applications.

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