Differential Gene Expression with Lossy Compression of Quality Scores in RNA-Seq Data

High-Throughput sequencing of RNA molecules has enabled the quantitative analysis of the expression of genes at the expense of storage space and processing power. To help alleviate these problems, lossy compression methods of the quality scores associated to RNA sequence data have recently been proposed, and the evaluation of their impact on downstream analysis is gaining attention. This work presents a first assessment of the impact of lossily compressed quality scores in RNA sequence data on the performance of some of the most recent tools used for differential gene expression.