DraculR

DraculR detects and quantifies haemolysis contamination in human plasma microRNA (miRNA) short-read sequencing data to support accurate miRNA biomarker discovery and downstream analyses.

Key Features:

• In Silico Haemolysis Prediction: Provides an in silico method to predict the degree of haemolysis contamination originating from red blood cell lysis in plasma-derived miRNA sequencing data.
• Input Data: Operates on raw read counts from short-read sequencing experiments of human plasma miRNA.
• Haemolysis Metric Calculation: Computes a quantitative metric reflecting the extent of haemolysis contamination for use in downstream analyses.

Scientific Applications:

• miRNA Biomarker Discovery: Assesses haemolysis to reduce confounding by red blood cell-derived miRNAs in biomarker identification from plasma samples.
• Quality Control of miRNA Sequencing Data: Provides a contamination metric for quality control to ensure downstream analyses reflect true biological signals rather than haemolysis artifacts.

Methodology:

Uses raw read counts from human plasma short-read miRNA sequencing to compute an in silico haemolysis metric that predicts the degree of haemolysis contamination.