Detection of statistically robust interactions from diverse RNA-DNA ligation data

Mapping genome-wide RNA-DNA interactions is possible using a variety of molecular methods, including using bridging oligonucleotides to ligate RNA and DNA in proximity. While molecular methods have progressed, a robust computational method for calling biologically meaningful RNA-DNA interactions from these data is lacking.

Herein, we present RADIAnT, a reads-to-interactions pipeline for analyzing RNA-DNA ligation data. RADIAnT calls interactions against a dataset-specific, unified background which considers RNA binding site-TSS distance and genomic region bias. By scaling the background with RNA abundance, RADIAnT is sensitive enough to detect specific interactions of lowly expressed transcripts, while remaining specific enough to discount false positive interactions of highly abundant RNAs.