TED toolkit: a comprehensive approach for convenient transcriptomic profiling as a clinically-oriented application

In translational medicine, the technology of RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) continues to prove powerful, and transforming the RNA-seq data into biological insights has become increasingly imperative. We present the Transcriptomics profiler for Easy Discovery (TED) toolkit, a comprehensive approach to processing and analyzing RNA-seq data. TED is divided into three major modules: data quality control, transcriptome data analysis, and data discovery, with eleven pipelines in total. These pipelines perform the preliminary steps from assessing and correcting the quality of the RNA-seq data, to the simultaneous analysis of five transcriptomic features (differentially expressed coding, non-coding, novel isoform genes, gene fusions, alternative splicing events, genetic variants of somatic and germline mutations) and ultimately translating the RNA-seq analysis findings into actionable, clinically-relevant reports. TED was evaluated using previously published prostate cancer transcriptome data where we observed previously studied outcomes, and also created a knowledge database of highly-integrated, biologically relevant reports demonstrating that it is well-positioned for clinical applications. TED is implemented on an instance of the Galaxy platform (Galaxy page: http://galaxy.hunter.cuny.edu/u/bioitcore/p/transcriptomics-profiler-for-easy-discovery-ted-toolkit , Documentation Manual: http://ted.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html ) as intuitive and reproducible pipelines providing a manageable strategy for conducting substantial transcriptome analysis in a routine and sustainable fashion for bioinformatics researchers and clinicians alike.