Detecting and quantifying circular RNAs in terabyte-scale RNA-seq datasets with CIRI3

To address recent challenges in circular RNA (circRNA) analysis, we present CIRI3, a tool for circRNA detection and quantification in terabyte-scale RNA-sequencing datasets. Using dynamic multithreaded task partitioning and a blocking search strategy for junction reads, CIRI3 is an order of magnitude faster than existing tools, while providing increased accuracy. We identified differentially spliced circRNAs across 2,535 cancer-related samples, and constructed a pretraining model and a biomarker network provided as the CIRIonco database. CIRI3 speeds up circRNA detection with low memory requirements.