MicroRazerS: rapid alignment of small RNA reads

MOTIVATION Deep sequencing has become the method of choice for determining the small RNA content of a cell. Mapping the sequenced reads onto their reference genome serves as the basis for all further analyses, namely for identification and quantification. A method frequently used is Mega BLAST followed by several filtering steps, even though it is slow and inefficient for this task. Also, none of the currently available short read aligners has established itself for the particular task of small RNA mapping. RESULTS We present MicroRazerS, a tool optimized for mapping small RNAs onto a reference genome. It is an order of magnitude faster than Mega BLAST and comparable in speed with other short read mapping tools. In addition, it is more sensitive and easy to handle and adjust. AVAILABILITY MicroRazerS is part of the SeqAn C++ library and can be downloaded from http://www.seqan.de/projects/MicroRazerS.html.