Sierra platinum: a fast and robust peak-caller for replicated ChIP-seq experiments with visual quality-control and -steering

Histone modifications play an important role in gene regulation. Their genomic locations are of great interest. Usually, the location is measured by ChIP-seq and analyzed with a peak-caller. Replicated ChIP-seq experiments become more and more available. However, their analysis is based on single-experiment peak-calling or on tools like PePr which allows peak-calling of replicates but whose underlying model might not be suitable for the conditions under which the experiments are performed. We propose a new peak-caller called 'Sierra Platinum' that allows peak-calling of replicated ChIP-seq experiments. Moreover, it provides a variety of quality measures together with integrated visualizations supporting the assessment of the replicates and the resulting peaks, as well as steering the peak-calling process. We show that Sierra Platinum outperforms currently available methods using a newly generated benchmark data set and using real data from the NIH Roadmap Epigenomics Project. It is robust against noisy replicates.