Keep Me Around: Intron Retention Detection and Analysis

Abstract: We present a tool, keep me around (kma), a suite of python scripts and an R package that finds retained introns in RNA-Seq experiments and incorporates biological replicates to reduce the number of false positives when detecting retention events. kma uses the results of existing quantification tools that probabilistically assign multi-mapping reads, thus interfacing easily with transcript quantification pipelines. The data is represented in a convenient, database style format that allows for easy aggregation across introns, genes, samples, and conditions to allow for further exploratory analysis.