Cufflinks assembles transcripts, estimates their abundances, and tests for differential expression and regulation in RNA-Seq samples. It accepts aligned RNA-Seq reads and assembles the alignments into a parsimonious set of transcripts. Cufflinks then estimates the relative abundances of these transcripts based on how many reads support each one.
Cufflinks is a collaborative effort between the Laboratory for Mathematical and Computational Biology, led by Lior Pachter at UC Berkeley, Steven Salzberg’s group at the University of Maryland Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, and Barbara Wold’s lab at Caltech.
Cufflinks is provided under the OSI-approved Boost License.
Trapnell C, Williams BA, Pertea G, Mortazavi AM, Kwan G, van Baren MJ, Salzberg SL, Wold B, Pachter L. Transcript assembly and quantification by RNA-Seq reveals unannotated transcripts and isoform switching during cell differentiation. Nature Biotechnology doi:10.1038/nbt. 1621.