Abstract

Ribosome profiling1 (Ribo-Seq) reveals genome-wide translation rates via the quantification of ribosome protected fragments (RPFs) of mRNAs. Significant differences of RPFs between conditions can indicate differential translation if they do not match changes in transcription. Reliably identifying translational differences is complicated by the fact that the mRNA level of the transcript directly affects the ribosome occupancy. Changes in mRNA abundances result in changes in RPFs due to differential transcription and not translation. As such, identification of differentially translated genes (DTGs) requires finding significant changes in RPF read counts that cannot be explained by variation in mRNA read counts.\n\nXiao et al.2 developed Xtail with the purpose of more accurately identifying DTGs in pairwise comparisons. Several other methods were also recently released (Ribodiff3 ...