near-optimal RNA-Seq quantification
Kallisto is a program for quantifying abundances of transcripts from
RNA-Seq data, or more generally of target sequences using high-throughput
sequencing reads. It is based on the novel idea of pseudoalignment for
rapidly determining the compatibility of reads with targets, without the
need for alignment. On benchmarks with standard RNA-Seq data, kallisto
can quantify 30 million human reads in less than 3 minutes on a Mac
desktop computer using only the read sequences and a transcriptome index
that itself takes less than 10 minutes to build. Pseudoalignment of
reads preserves the key information needed for quantification, and
kallisto is therefore not only fast, but also as accurate than existing
quantification tools. In fact, because the pseudoalignment procedure is
robust to errors in the reads, in many benchmarks kallisto significantly
outperforms existing tools.
