Development of two new approaches for NGS data analysis of DNA and RNA molecules and their application in clinical and research fields

The aim of this study is focused on two main areas of NGS analysis data: RNA-seq(with a specific interest in meta-transcriptomics) and DNA somatic mutations detection. We developed a simple and efficient pipeline for the analysis of NGS data derived from gene panels to identify DNA somatic point mutations. In particular we optimized a somatic variant calling procedure that was tested on simulated datasets and on real data. The performance of our system has been compared with currently available tools for variant calling reviewed in literature. For RNA-seq analysis, in this work we tested and optimized STAble, an algorithm developed originally in our laboratory for the de novo reconstruction of transcripts from non reference based RNA-seq data. At the beginning of this study, the first module of STAble was already been written. The first module is the one which reconstructs a list of transcripts starting from RNA-seq data. The aim of this study, particularly, consisted in adding a new module to STAble, developed in collaboration with Cambridge University, based on the flux-balance analysis in order to link the metatranscriptomic analysis to a metabolic approach. This goal has been achieved in order to study the metabolic fluxes of microbiota starting from metatranscriptomic data.