Arriba is a command-line tool for the detection of gene fusions from RNA-Seq data. It was developed for the use in a clinical research setting. Therefore, short runtimes and high sensitivity were important design criteria. It is based on the ultrafast STAR aligner and the post-alignment runtime is typically just ~2 minutes. In contrast to many other fusion detection tools which build on STAR, Arriba does not require to reduce the alignIntronMax parameter of STAR to detect fusions arising from focal deletions.

Apart from gene fusions, Arriba can detect other structural rearrangements with potential clinical relevance, such as exon duplications or truncations of genes (i.e., breakpoints in introns and intergenic regions).

Arriba is the winner of the DREAM SMC-RNA Challenge, an international competition organized by ICGC, TCGA, IBM, and Sage Bionetworks to determine the current gold standard for the detection of gene fusions from RNA-Seq data. The final results of the challenge are posted on the Round 5 Leaderboard.

Please refer to the quickstart guide. Note: You should not use git clone to download Arriba, because the git repository does not include the blacklist!