robust statistical modeling improves sensitivity of high-throughput rnA structure probing experiments

Structure probing coupled with high-throughput sequencing holds the potential to revolutionize our understanding of the role of RNA structure in regulation of gene expression. Despite major technological advances, intrinsic noise and high coverage requirements greatly limit the applicability of these techniques. Here we describe a probabilistic modeling pipeline which accounts for biological variability and biases in the data, yielding statistically interpretable scores for the probability of nucleotide modification transcriptome-wide. We demonstrate on two yeast data sets that our method has greatly increased sensitivity, enabling the identification of modified regions on many more transcripts compared with existing pipelines. It also provides confident predictions at much lower coverage levels than previously reported. Our results show that statistical modeling greatly extends the scope and potential of transcriptome-wide structure probing experiments. Two datasets of yeast transcriptome ChemModSeq data. Two samples probed with NAI and two negative control samples