Trinity

Introduction

Trinity, developed at the Broad Institute and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, represents a novel method for the efficient and robust de novo reconstruction of transcriptomes from RNA-seq data. Trinity combines three independent software modules: Inchworm, Chrysalis, and Butterfly, applied sequentially to process large volumes of RNA-seq reads. Trinity partitions the sequence data into many individual de Bruijn graphs, each representing the transcriptional complexity at a given gene or locus, and then processes each graph independently to extract full-length splicing isoforms and to tease apart transcripts derived from paralogous genes. Briefly, the process works like so:

• Inchworm assembles the RNA-seq data into the unique sequences of transcripts, often generating full-length transcripts for a dominant isoform, but then reports just the unique portions of alternatively spliced transcripts.

• Chrysalis clusters the Inchworm contigs into clusters and constructs complete de Bruijn graphs for each cluster. Each cluster represents the full transcriptonal complexity for a given gene (or sets of genes that share sequences in common). Chrysalis then partitions the full read set among these disjoint graphs.

• Butterfly then processes the individual graphs in parallel, tracing the paths that reads and pairs of reads take within the graph, ultimately reporting full-length transcripts for alternatively spliced isoforms, and teasing apart transcripts that corresponds to paralogous genes.

Installed version

There are currently two version of Trinity installed:

• 2.2.0
• 2.4.0

Documentation

The full documentation can be found here.