Benchmarking tRNA-Seq quantification approaches by realistic tRNA-Seq data simulation identifies two novel approaches with higher accuracy

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Quantification of transfer RNA (tRNA) using illumina sequencing based tRNA-Seq is complicated due to their degree of redundancy and extensive modifications. As such, no tRNA-Seq method has become well established, while various approaches have been proposed to quantify tRNAs from sequencing reads. Here, we use realistic tRNA-Seq simulations to benchmark tRNA-Seq quantification approaches, including two novel approaches. We demonstrate that these novel approaches are consistently the most accurate, using data simulated to mimic five different tRNA-Seq methods. This simulation-based benchmarking also identifies specific shortfalls for each quantification approach and suggests that up to 13% of the variance observed between cell lines in real tRNA-Seq data could be due to systematic differences in quantification accuracy.