saseR: Juggling offsets unlocks RNA-seq tools for fast and Scalable differential usage, Aberrant Splicing and Expression Retrieval.

Abstract

RNA-seq data analysis relies on many different tools, each tailored to specific applications and coming with unique assumptions and restrictions. Indeed, tools for differential transcript usage, or diagnosing patients with rare diseases through splicing and expression outliers, either lack in performance, discard information, or do not scale to massive data compendia. Here, we show that replacing the normalisation offsets unlocks bulk RNA-seq workflows for scalable differential usage, aberrant splicing and expression analyses. Our method, saseR, is much faster than state-of-the-art methods, dramatically outperforms these to detect aberrant splicing, and provides a single workflow for various short- and long-read RNA-seq applications.