STAR Chimeric Post for rapid detection of circular RNA and fusion transcripts

Motivation: The biological relevance of chimeric RNA alignments is now well established. Chimera arising as chromosomal fusions are often drivers of cancer, and recently discovered circular RNA are only now being characterized. While software already exists for fusion discovery and quantitation, high false positive rates and high run-times hamper scalable fusion discovery on large datasets. Furthermore, very little software is available for circular RNA detection and quantification. Results: Here we present STAR Chimeric Post (STARChip), a novel software package that processes chimeric alignments from the STAR aligner and produces annotated circular RNA and high precision fusions in a rapid, efficient, and scalable manner that is appropriate for high dimensional medical omics datasets. Availability and Implementation: STARChip is available at https://github.com/LosicLab/STARChip Supplementary Information: Supplementary figures and tables are available at Bioinformatics online.