WALTER: an easy way to online evaluate telomere lengths from terminal restriction fragment analysis

0542027 - BFÚ 2022 RIV GB eng J - Journal Article
Lycka, M. - Peška, Vratislav - Demko, M. - Spyroglou, I. - Kilar, A. - Fajkus, Jiří - Fojtová, M.
WALTER: an easy way to online evaluate telomere lengths from terminal restriction fragment analysis.
BMC Bioinformatics. Roč. 22, č. 1 (2021), č. článku 145. ISSN 1471-2105. E-ISSN 1471-2105
R&D Projects: GA ČR(CZ) GA18-07027S; GA ČR(CZ) GX20-01331X; GA MŠMT EF15_003/0000477
Institutional support: RVO:68081707
Keywords : Telomere length * Terminal restriction fragments * Online toolset
OECD category: Biochemistry and molecular biology
Impact factor: 3.327, year: 2021
Method of publishing: Open access
https://bmcbioinformatics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12859-021-04064-0

BackgroundTelomeres, nucleoprotein structures comprising short tandem repeats and delimiting the ends of linear eukaryotic chromosomes, play an important role in the maintenance of genome stability. Therefore, the determination of the length of telomeres is of high importance for many studies. Over the last years, new methods for the analysis of the length of telomeres have been developed, including those based on PCR or analysis of NGS data. Despite that, terminal restriction fragment (TRF) method remains the gold standard to this day. However, this method lacks universally accepted and precise tool capable to analyse and statistically evaluate TRF results.ResultsTo standardize the processing of TRF results, we have developed WALTER, an online toolset allowing rapid, reproducible, and user-friendly analysis including statistical evaluation of the data. Given its web-based nature, it provides an easily accessible way to analyse TRF data without any need to install additional software.ConclusionsWALTER represents a major upgrade from currently available tools for the image processing of TRF scans. This toolset enables a rapid, highly reproducible, and user-friendly evaluation of almost any TRF scan including in-house statistical evaluation of the data. WALTER platform together with user manual describing the evaluation of TRF scans in detail and presenting tips and troubleshooting, as well as test data to demo the software are available at https://www.ceitec.eu/chromatin-molecular-complexes-jiri-fajkus/rg51/tab?tabId=125#WALTER and the source code at https://github.com/mlyc93/WALTER.
Permanent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11104/0319522