Kallisto from Pachterlab for RNAseq Quantification
We already posted slides on this topic a few months back. Now the code and other details are available online from Pachter’s website.
kallisto is a program for quantifying abundances of transcripts from RNA-Seq data, or more generally of target sequences using high-throughput sequencing reads. It is based on the novel idea of pseudoalignment for rapidly determining the compatibility of reads with targets, without the need for alignment. On benchmarks with standard RNA-Seq data, kallisto can quantify 30 million human reads in less than 3 minutes on a Mac desktop computer using only the read sequences and a transcriptome index that itself takes less than 10 minutes to build. Pseudoalignment of reads preserves the key information needed for quantification, and kallisto is therefore not only fast, but also as accurate than existing quantification tools. In fact, because the pseudoalignment procedure is robust to errors in the reads, in many benchmarks kallisto significantly outperforms existing tools.
The figures above show the performance of kallisto as compared to other programs. Running times are based on 20 cores used to quantify 20 samples each with 30 million reads. kallisto is hundreds of times faster than standard tools (when disk access is not a limiting factor kallisto is even faster, averaging about 2.5 minutes per run). Sailfish is much faster than most tools, although still significantly slower than kallisto, and its approach of shredding reads into k-mers reduces accuracy. This can be seen in the plot on the right which shows the median relative difference of quantifications with respect to the truth from simulations. Reads were simulated using the RSEM simulator.
The speed of kallisto makes it tractable to use the bootstrap to determine uncertainty on estimates. Uncertainty estimates can be used in downstream applications and kallisto includes infrastructure for managing the large amount of data associated with bootstrapped samples. A companion tool to kallisto, called sleuth can be used to visualize and interpret kallisto quantifications, and soon to perform many popular differential analyses in a way that accounts for uncertainty in estimates.
