PARamrfinder: detecting allele-specific DNA methylation on multicore clusters

Abstract

[Abstract]: The discovery of Allele-Specific Methylation (ASM) is an important research field in biology as it regulates genomic imprinting, which has been identified as the cause of some genetic diseases. Nevertheless, the high computational cost of the bioinformatic tools developed for this purpose prevents their application to large-scale datasets. Hence, much faster tools are required to further progress in this research field. In this work we present PARamrfinder, a parallel tool that applies a statistical model to identify ASM in data from high-throughput short-read bisulfite sequencing. It is based on the state-of-the-art sequential tool amrfinder, which is able to detect ASM at regional level from Bisulfite Sequencing (BS-Seq) experiments in the absence of Single Nucleotide Polymorphism information. PARamrfinder provides the same Allelically Methylated Regions as amrfinder but at significantly reduced runtime thanks to exploiting the compute capabilities of common multicore CPU clusters and MPI RMA operations to attain an efficient dynamic workload balance. As an example, our tool is up to 567 times faster for real data experiments on a cluster with 8 nodes, each one containing two 16-core processors. The source code of PARamrfinder, as well as a reference manual, is available at https://github.com/UDC-GAC/PARamrfinder.