Accurate detection of short and long active ORFs using Ribo-seq data

Abstract Motivation Ribo-seq, a technique for deep-sequencing ribosome-protected mRNA fragments, has enabled transcriptome-wide monitoring of translation in vivo. It has opened avenues for re-evaluating the coding potential of open reading frames (ORFs), including many short ORFs that were previously presumed to be non-translating. However, the detection of translating ORFs, specifically short ORFs, from Ribo-seq data, remains challenging due to its high heterogeneity and noise. Results We present ribotricer, a method for detecting actively translating ORFs by directly leveraging the three-nucleotide periodicity of Ribo-seq data. Ribotricer demonstrates higher accuracy and robustness compared with other methods at detecting actively translating ORFs including short ORFs on multiple published datasets across species inclusive of Arabidopsis, Caenorhabditis elegans, Drosophila, human, mouse, rat, yeast and zebrafish. Availability and implementation Ribotricer is available at https://github.com/smithlabcode/ribotricer. All analysis scripts and results are available at https://github.com/smithlabcode/ribotricer-results. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.