Ribosome profiling, or Ribo-seq, provides precise information about the position of actively translating ribosomes. It can be used to identify open reading frames (ORFs) that are translated in a given sample. The RiboTaper pipeline, and the ORFquant R package, leverages the periodic distribution of such ribosomes along the ORF to perform a statistically robust test for translation which is insensitive to aperiodic noise and provides a statistically robust measure of translation. In addition to accounting for complex loci with overlapping ORFs, ORFquant is also able to use Ribo-seq as a tool for distinguishing actively translated transcripts from non-translated ones, within a given gene locus.
Keywords: Genomics; Open reading frame; Periodicity; Ribo-seq; Ribosome; Sequencing; Translation.