smalldisco, a pipeline for siRNA discovery and 3’ tail identification

Capturing and sequencing small RNAs is standard practice, however identification of a group of these small RNAs—small interfering RNAs (siRNAs)—has historically been an inconsistent and vague practice. We present smalldisco, a command-line tool for small interfering RNA discovery and annotation from small RNA-seq datasets. smalldisco can distinguish short reads that map antisense to exons, termed siRNAs, annotate these siRNAs by genomic feature (e.g., gene or exon) defined by the user, and quantify their abundance. smalldisco also uses the program Tailor to quantify 3’ non-templated nucleotides of siRNAs or any small RNA species. smalldisco is available for download from GitHub (https://github.com/ianvcaldas/smalldisco).