Sensitive and highly resolved identification of RNA-protein interaction sites in PAR-CLIP data

摘要

BackgroundPAR-CLIP is a recently developed Next Generation Sequencing-based method enabling transcriptome-wide identification of interaction sites between RNA and RNA-binding proteins. The PAR-CLIP procedure induces specific base transitions that originate from sites of RNA-protein interactions and can therefore guide the identification of binding sites. However, additional sources of transitions, such as cell type-specific SNPs and sequencing errors, challenge the inference of binding sites and suitable statistical approaches are crucial to control false discovery rates. In addition, a highly resolved delineation of binding sites followed by an extensive downstream analysis is necessary for a comprehensive characterization of the protein binding preferences and the subsequent design of validation experiments.