MeTDiff: A Novel Differential RNA Methylation Analysis for MeRIP-Seq Data

Abstract

N6-Methyladenosine (m⁶A) transcriptome methylation is an exciting new research area that just captures the attention of research community. We present in this paper, MeTDiff, a novel computational tool for predicting differential m⁶A methylation sites from Methylated RNA immunoprecipitation sequencing (MeRIP-Seq) data. Compared with the existing algorithm exomePeak, the advantages of MeTDiff are that it explicitly models the reads variation in data and also devices a more power likelihood ratio test for differential methylation site prediction. Comprehensive evaluation of MeTDiff's performance using both simulated and real datasets showed that MeTDiff is much more robust and achieved much higher sensitivity and specificity over exomePeak. The R package "MeTDiff" and additional details are available at: https://github.com/compgenomics/MeTDiff.