A flexible ChIP-sequencing simulation toolkit

Background: A major challenge in evaluating quantitative ChIP-seq analyses, such as peak calling and differential binding, is a lack of reliable ground truth data. Accurate simulation of ChIP-seq data can mitigate this challenge, but existing frameworks are either too cumbersome to apply genome-wide...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Goren, A. (Author), Gymrek, M. (Author), Lamkin, M. (Author), Qiu, Y. (Author), Ren, K. (Author), Zheng, A. (Author)
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: BioMed Central Ltd 2021
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Online Access:View Fulltext in Publisher
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Summary:Background: A major challenge in evaluating quantitative ChIP-seq analyses, such as peak calling and differential binding, is a lack of reliable ground truth data. Accurate simulation of ChIP-seq data can mitigate this challenge, but existing frameworks are either too cumbersome to apply genome-wide or unable to model a number of important experimental conditions in ChIP-seq. Results: We present ChIPs, a toolkit for rapidly simulating ChIP-seq data using statistical models of key experimental steps. We demonstrate how ChIPs can be used for a range of applications, including benchmarking analysis tools and evaluating the impact of various experimental parameters. ChIPs is implemented as a standalone command-line program written in C++ and is available from https://github.com/gymreklab/chips. Conclusions: ChIPs is an efficient ChIP-seq simulation framework that generates realistic datasets over a flexible range of experimental conditions. It can serve as an important component in various ChIP-seq analyses where ground truth data are needed. © 2021, The Author(s).
ISBN:14712105 (ISSN)
DOI:10.1186/s12859-021-04097-5