Optimizing Splicing Junction Detection in Next Generation Sequencing Data on a Virtual-GRID Infrastructure

The new protocol for sequencing the messenger RNA in a cell, named RNA-seq produce millions of short sequence fragments. Next Generation Sequencing technology allows more accurate analysis but increase needs in term of computational resources. This paper describes the optimization of a RNA-seq analysis pipeline devoted to splicing variants detection, aimed at reducing computation time and providing a multi-user/multisample environment. This work brings two main contributions. First, we optimized a well-known algorithm called TopHat by parallelizing some sequential mapping steps. Second, we designed and implemented a hybrid virtual GRID infrastructure allowing to efficiently execute multiple instances of TopHat running on different samples or on behalf of different users, thus optimizing the overall execution time and enabling a flexible multi-user environment.