bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/137141; this version posted May 12, 2017. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY 4.0 International license. LTR_retriever: a highly accurate and sensitive program for identification of LTR retrotransposons Shujun Ou and Ning Jiang* Department of Horticulture, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, 48824, USA ORCID IDs: 0000-0001-5938-7180 (S.O.); 0000-0002-2776-6669 (N.J.) * To whom correspondence should be addressed. Tel: +1 (517) 353-0381; Fax: +1 (517) 353-0890; Email:
[email protected] ABSTRACT Long terminal repeat retrotransposons (LTR-RTs) are prevalent in most plant genomes. Identification of LTR-RTs is critical for achieving high-quality gene annotation. The sequences of LTR-RTs are diverse among species, yet the structure of the element is well conserved. Based on the conserved structure, multiple programs were developed for de novo identification of LTR-RTs. Most of these programs are associated with low specificity, and excessive curation is required since false positives are very detrimental for downstream analyses. Here we report LTR_retriever, a multithreading empowered Perl program that identifies LTR retrotransposons and generates high- quality LTR libraries from genomes with various assembly qualities. LTR_retriever demonstrated significant improvements by achieving high levels of sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, and precision, which are 91.7%, 96.9%, 95.7%, and 90.0%, respectively, in rice (Oryza sativa). Besides LTR-RTs with canonical ends (TG..CA), LTR_retriever also identifies non-canonical LTRs accurately.