Abstract 5290: ChimericSeq: an easy-to-use program for discovery and analysis of integration events from NGS data

The purpose of this study was to develop a computational method of extracting viral integration events from NGS data in an intuitive way that could accommodate access from users of all disciplines. Viral integration into the host genome is a characteristic of many pathogenic viruses, including the hepatitis B virus (HBV) and human papillomavirus (HPV). Gradual insertion of viral components near proto-oncogenes of the host genome over time can induce uncontrolled cellular proliferation, eventually leading to carcinogenesis. While increased availability of high-throughput next generation sequencing (NGS) has provided tools for researchers to discover these underlying host changes due to viral integrations, there is an emerging need for analytical support of this data. Here we present ChimericSeq, a user-friendly program that can quickly identify viral integration events from NGS data. To fully evaluate this program, we compared the functionality of ChimericSeq to other current viral integration programs. A number of synthetic data sets of HBV sequence fragments integrated into 100bp fragments of random human genomic DNA were created to mimic the nature of chimeric reads of NGS data. ChimericSeq was able to correctly identify reads containing at least 25bp of viral sequence at 100% accuracy. This was a major improvement over the current programs, VirusClip and ViralFusionSeq, which could not detect reads with only 25bp of viral sequence, and even had difficulty correctly identifying viral integration sites containing additional viral sequence. Furthermore, ChimericSeq could detect viral events nearly 10X and 100X faster than these current programs, respectively. Upon testing of NGS data from actual HBV-positive human tissue, we found that ChimericSeq was not only much faster, but was also able to detect more unique viral integration events than current viral integration tools. In conclusion, ChimericSeq expands NGS analytical support to a broader spectrum of the scientific community, being the first program of its kind to offer support in an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) for commonly used operating platforms, such as Windows and Mac. Citation Format: Patrick Jongeneel, Selena Lin, Jamin Steffen, Surbhi Jain, Ying-Hsiu Su, Wei Song. ChimericSeq: an easy-to-use program for discovery and analysis of integration events from NGS data. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 107th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research; 2016 Apr 16-20; New Orleans, LA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2016;76(14 Suppl):Abstract nr 5290.