MOTIVATION: The avalanche of data arriving since the development of NGS technologies have prompted the need for developing fast, accurate and easily automated bioinformatic tools capable of dealing with massive datasets. Among the most productive applications of NGS technologies is the sequencing of cellular RNA, known as RNA-Seq. Although RNA-Seq provides similar or superior dynamic range than microarrays at similar or lower cost, the lack of standard and user-friendly pipelines is a bottleneck preventing RNA-Seq from becoming the standard for transcriptome analysis. RESULTS: In this work we present a pipeline for processing and analyzing RNA-Seq data, that we have named Grape (Grape RNA-Seq Analysis Pipeline Environment). Grape supports raw sequencing reads produced by a variety of technologies, either in FASTA or FASTQ format, or as prealigned reads in SAM/BAM format. A minimal Grape configuration consists of the file location of the raw sequencing reads, the genome of the species and the corresponding gene and transcript annotation. Grape first runs a set of quality control steps, and then aligns the reads to the genome, a step that is omitted for prealigned read formats. Grape next estimates gene and transcript expression levels, calculates exon inclusion levels and identifies novel transcripts. Grape can be run on a single computer or in parallel on a computer cluster. It is distributed with specific mapping and quantification tools, but given its modular design, any tool supporting popular data interchange formats can be integrated. AVAILABILITY: Grape can be obtained from the Bioinformatics and Genomics website at: http://big.crg.cat/services/grape.

MOTIVATION: Novel technologies brought in unprecedented amounts of high-throughput sequencing data along with great challenges in their analysis and interpretation. The percent-spliced-in (PSI, ) metric estimates the incidence of single-exon-skipping events and can be computed directly by counting reads that align to known or predicted splice junctions. However, the majority of human splicing events are more complex than single-exon skipping. RESULTS: In this short report, we present a framework that generalizes the metric to arbitrary classes of splicing events. We change the view from exon centric to intron centric and split the value of into two indices, and , measuring the rate of splicing at the 5' and 3' end of the intron, respectively. The advantage of having two separate indices is that they deconvolute two distinct elementary acts of the splicing reaction. The completeness of splicing index is decomposed in a similar way. This framework is implemented as bam2ssj, a BAM-file-processing pipeline for strand-specific counting of reads that align to splice junctions or overlap with splice sites. It can be used as a consistent protocol for quantifying splice junctions from RNA-seq data because no such standard procedure currently exists. AVAILABILITY: The C code of bam2ssj is open source and is available at https://github.com/pervouchine/bam2ssj CONTACT: [email protected]