MethylStar: A fast and robust pre-processing pipeline for bulk or single-cell whole-genome bisulfite sequencing data

Background Whole-Genome Bisulfite Sequencing (WGBS) is a Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technique for measuring DNA methylation at base resolution. Continuing drops in sequencing costs are beginning to enable high-throughput surveys of DNA methylation in large samples of individuals and/or single cells. These surveys can easily generate hundreds or even thousands of WGBS datasets in a single study. The efficient pre-processing of these large amounts of data poses major computational challenges and creates unnecessary bottlenecks for downstream analysis and biological interpretation. Results To offer an efficient analysis solution, we present MethylStar, a fast, stable and flexible pre-processing pipeline for WGBS data. MethylStar integrates well-established tools for read trimming, alignment and methylation state calling in a highly parallelized environment, manages computational resources and performs automatic error detection. MethylStar offers easy installation through a dockerized container with all preloaded dependencies and also features a user-friendly interface designed for experts/non-experts. Application of MethylStar to WGBS from Human, Maize and A. thaliana shows favorable performance in terms of speed and memory requirements compared with existing pipelines. Conclusions MethylStar is a fast, stable and flexible pipeline for high-throughput pre-processing of bulk or single-cell WGBS data. Its easy installation and user-friendly interface should make it a useful resource for the wider epigenomics community. MethylStar is distributed under GPL-3.0 license and source code is publicly available for download from github https://github.com/jlab-code/MethylStar . Installation through a docker image is available from http://jlabdata.org/methylstar.tar.gz