Summary: DamID is a powerful technique for identifying regions of the genome bound by a DNA-binding (or DNA-associated) protein. Currently no method exists for automatically processing next-generation sequencing DamID (DamID-seq) data, and the use of DamID-seq datasets with normalisation based on read-counts alone can lead to high background and the loss of bound signal. DamID-seq thus presents novel challenges in terms of normalisation and background minimisation. We describe here damidseq_pipeline, a software pipeline that performs automatic normalisation and background reduction on multiple DamID-seq FASTQ datasets.

Availability and implementation: Open-source and freely available from http://owenjm.github.io/damidseq_pipeline. The damidseq_pipeline is implemented in Perl and is compatible with any Unix-based operating system (e.g. Linux, Mac OSX).

Contact: o.marshall@gurdon.cam.ac.uk