PeakRanger: A cloud-enabled peak caller for ChIP-seq data

Background: Chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP), coupled with massively parallel short-read sequencing (seq) is used to probe chromatin dynamics. Although there are many algorithms to call peaks from ChIP-seq datasets, most are tuned either to handle punctate sites, such as transcriptional factor binding sites, or broad regions, such as histone modification marks; few can do both. Other algorithms are limited in their configurability, performance on large data sets, and ability to distinguish closely-spaced peaks. Results: In this paper, we introduce PeakRanger, a peak caller software package that works equally well on punctate and broad sites, can resolve closely-spaced peaks, has excellent performance, and is easily customized. In addition, PeakRanger can be run in a parallel cloud computing environment to obtain extremely high performance on very large data sets. We present a series of benchmarks to evaluate PeakRanger against 10 other peak callers, and demonstrate the performance...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: Xin Feng, Robert Grossman, Lincoln Stein
• Keywords: Biometrics, BMCBI 2011, Chromatin Dynamics, Project Conclusions, Sensitivity And Specificity