IEEE Xplore: MeTDiff: A Novel Differential RNA Methylation Analysis for MeRIP-Seq Data

N6-Methyladenosine (m6A) transcriptome methylation is an exciting new research area that just captures the attention of the research community. We present in this paper, MeTDiff, a novel computational tool for predicting differential m6A methylation sites from Methylated RNA immunoprecipitation sequencing (MeRIP-Seq) data. Compared with the existing algorithm exomePeak, the advantages of MeTDiff are that it explicitly models the reads variation in data and also devices a more power likelihood ratio test for differential methylation site prediction. A comprehensive evaluation of MeTDiff’s performance using both simulated and real datasets showed that MeTDiff is much more robust and achieved much higher sensitivity and specificity over exomePeak.