Section: New Software and Platforms

SortMeRNA – Metatranscriptome classification

Software web site: http://bioinfo.lille.inria.fr/RNA/sortmerna

Licence: GPL

Objective: SortMeRNA is a tool designed to rapidly filter ribosomal RNA fragments from metatranscriptomic data produced by next-generation sequencers. It is available for download from our website, or through the open web-based platform Galaxy. The development version is also available on GitHub. SortMeRNA was first released in October 2012. It is now used in production by Genoscope (French National Center for Sequencing) to process all metatranscriptomic data of the Tara Ocean Expedition, and has been integrated in several other computational pipelines (Qiime developed at University of Colorado at Boulder, MetaMetadb developed at University of Tokyo, Leimena pipeline developed at Wageningen University,...).

SortMeRNA is still under development through a partnership with the Knight lab (University of Colorado at Boulder). Version 2.0 has been released in November 2014, and has extended functionalities. It can now perform sequence alignments to any ribosomal RNA database, which allows the user to study the taxonomic content of a microbial sample. This new version has been presented at the international workshops [12] , [11] .