Transposons are genomic parasites, and their new insertions can cause instability and spur the evolution of their host genomes. Rapid accumulation of short-read whole-genome sequencing data provides a great opportunity for studying new transposon insertions and their impacts on the host genome. Here we present a new method TEMP2 for detecting fixed germline insertions and de novo “singleton” insertions in eukaryotic genomes. TEMP2 achieves high sensitivity and precision for detecting germline insertions when compared with existing tools using both simulated data in fly and experimental data in fly and human. Furthermore, TEMP2 can accurately assess the frequencies of de novo transposon insertions even with high levels of chimeric reads in simulated datasets.

TEMP2 Github: https://github.com/weng-lab/TEMP2
TEMP Github: https://github.com/JialiUMassWengLab/TEMP

Please cite the following paper if you are using TEMP2 for transposon insertion detecting:
Yu et al. A benchmark and an algorithm for detecting germline transposon insertions and measuring de novo transposon insertion frequencies. Nucleic Acid Research. 2021