Salmon is a wicked-fast program to produce a highly-accurate, transcript-level quantification estimates from RNA-seq data. Salmon achieves is accuracy and speed via a number of different innovations, including the use of lightweight alignments (accurate but fast-to-compute proxies for traditional read alignments) and massively-parallel stochastic collapsed variational inference. The result is a versatile tool that fits nicely into many differnt pipelines. For example, you can choose to make use of our lightweight alignments by providing Salmon with raw sequencing reads, or, if it is more convenient, you can provide Salmon with regular alignments (e.g. computed with your favorite aligner), and it will use the same wicked-fast, state-of-the-art inference algorithm to estimate transcript-level abundances for your experiment.
Give salmon a try! You can find the latest binary releases here.
The documentation for Salmon is available on ReadTheDocs, check it out here.
You can chat with the Salmon developers and other users via Gitter!
