CATANA: a tool for generating comprehensive annotations of alternative transcript events.

Abstract

In higher eukaryotes, the generation of transcript isoforms from a single gene through alternative splicing (AS) and alternative transcription (AT) mechanisms increases functional and regulatory diversities. Annotating these alternative transcript events is essential for genomic studies. However, there are no existing tools that generate comprehensive annotations of all these alternative transcript events including both AS and AT events. In the present study, we develop CATANA, with the encoded exon usage patterns based on the flattened gene model, to identify ten types of AS and AT events. We demonstrate the power and versatility of CATANA by showing greater depth of annotations of alternative transcript events according to either genome annotation or RNA-seq data. CATANA is available on https://github.com/shiauck/CATANA. Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.