STAR-Fusion

Overview

STAR-Fusion is a gene-fusion detection tool that uses the STAR aligner to identify chimeric RNA reads spanning two distinct genomic loci. It applies a series of filters (panel-of-normals, FFPM thresholds, minimum read support) to reduce false-positive fusion calls from RNA-seq data. STAR-Fusion is the dominant caller in multi-tool fusion pipelines due to its sensitivity and integration with the widely-used STAR aligner.

Used by

• Primary fusion caller in the TCGA pan-cancer fusion analysis across 9,624 tumor samples and 713 normal samples spanning 33 cancer types; run alongside EricScript and BREAKFAST; STAR-Fusion-only calls required FFPM > 0.1 threshold; recovered 95.5% (405/424) of curated TCGA marker-paper fusions; yielded 25,664 filtered fusions with 63.3% WGS validation rate PMID:29617662

Notes

• STAR-Fusion is the dominant caller in this multi-tool pipeline; results inherit STAR-Fusion biases even with multi-tool integration.
• FFPM (Fusion Fragments Per Million) > 0.1 was required for STAR-Fusion-only calls; calls supported by ≥2 tools had relaxed thresholds.
• Paired with STAR-aligner for upstream mapping.

Sources

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