xIP-seq Platform: An Integrative Framework for High-Throughput Sequencing Data Analysis

Abstract

We report an integrative bioinformatic platform for next-generation sequencing data analysis, xIP-seq, which is built on GenePattern package. The purpose for this tool is to provide analysis pipelines for data derived from next-generation sequencing following a variety of experiments using immunoprecipitation, such as ChIP-seq (chromatin immunoprecipitation following sequencing) for analysis of DNA binding protein, CLIP-seq (cross-linking immunoprecipitation following sequencing) for analysis of RNA binding protein, and MeDIP-seq (methylation DNA immunoprecipitation following sequencing) for DNA methylation profiles. xIP-seq platform provides standardized data pre-processing workflows which prepare raw data from various sequencing platforms for further analysis, and several bioinformatic applications including sequence annotation and analysis of Pol II binding pattern and histone modification.. The tertiary module for sequence annotation is particularly discussed. xIP-seq also allows users to construct new analysis pipelines tailored for individual biological interests by employing currently available modules or creating new ones. As an example, a “CLIP-seq Mapper” pipeline is created to map CLIP-seq-derived data to human genome to identify the genome-wide annotation of SFRS1 binding pattern. This implementation demonstrates the significance of xIP-seq platform to analyze massive amounts of next-generation sequencing data and provide automatic, flexible, and intelligent enterprise-level bioinformatic solutions.