proTRAC

proTRAC is an unique and handy tool for probabilistic piRNA cluster detection, visualization, and analysis. proTRAC shows higher sensitivity and selectivity compared to hitherto applied methods of cluster detection. The significance of the observed sequence read hit density, strand bias, amount of loci corresponding to infrequently mapped sequence reads, amount of loci with T at position 1 or A at position 10 and the amount of loci within the typical piRNA length range (26-32nt) are taken into account. The observed characteristics of cluster candidates are evaluated in the light of the given dataset and are subject to a probabilistic scoring system.