BleTIES: Annotation of natural genome editing in ciliates using long read sequencing.

SUMMARY Ciliates are single-celled eukaryotes that eliminate specific, interspersed DNA sequences (internally eliminated sequences, IESs) from their genomes during development. These are challenging to annotate and assemble because IES-containing sequences are typically much less abundant in the cell than those without, and IES sequences themselves often contain repetitive and low-complexity sequences. Long read sequencing technologies from Pacific Biosciences and Oxford Nanopore have the potential to reconstruct longer IESs than has been possible with short reads, but require a different assembly strategy. Here we present BleTIES, a software toolkit for detecting, assembling, and analyzing IESs using mapped long reads. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION BleTIES is implemented in Python 3. Source code is available at https://github.com/Swart-lab/bleties (MIT license), and also distributed via Bioconda. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION Benchmarking of BleTIES with published sequence data.