question: Which data simulator is available for CLIP-SEQ experiments?
answer: CLIP-Seq protocols such as PAR-CLIP, HITS-CLIP or iCLIP allow a genome-wide analysis of protein-RNA interactions. For the processing of the resulting short read data, various tools are utilized. Some of these tools were specifically developed for CLIP-Seq data, whereas others were designed for the analysis of RNA-Seq data. To this date, however, it has not been assessed which of the available tools are most appropriate for the analysis of CLIP-Seq data. This is because an experimental gold standard dataset on which methods can be accessed and compared, is still not available. To address this lack of a gold-standard dataset, Cseq-Simulator was developed as a simulator for PAR-CLIP, HITS-CLIP and iCLIP-data. This simulator can be applied to generate realistic datasets that can serve as surrogates for experimental gold standard dataset.