Parameters

Parameter

Name

Variable

Default

Value

Parameter

Range

Description
FRAG_UR_D0
 1>0minimum length of fragments produced by hydrolysis
FRAG_UR_DELTA
 NaN1geometry of the fragmentation process (1=linear, 2=surface-diameter, 3=volume-diameter, etc.); if not explicitly specified (NaN), the geometry of breakage depends logarithmically on the molecule length
FRAG_UR_ETA
 NaN1intensity of fragmentation, determining the number of breaks per unit length; if not explicitly specified (NaN),  is determined by the corresponding  value and an expectation of 200nt (or the mean filtered fragment size, if size selection is used) long fragments

1 NaN stands for "Not a Number" and marks the uninitialized state of a parameter

Algorithm

Frequencies  of fragment sizes  produced by a uniform random fragmentation process have demonstrated to fall along Weibull distributions , if the fragmentation thermodynamics depends on the molecule size:

Scale parameter  represents the intensity of fragmentation (i.e., breaks per unit length), and—as a determinant of the mean expected fragment size—is assumed to be constant across molecules of different lengths for fragmentation protocols where the number of produced fragments depends on the molecule length. Shape parameter  reflects the geometric relation in which random fragmentation is breaking a molecule (e.g.,  corresponds to uniform fragmentation on the linear chain of nucleotides,  splits uniformly the surface, and  the volume, etc.).

The Flux Simulator uses a 3-step algorithm to tokenize a molecule; first, geometry  and the number  of fragments that are obtained from the molecule are determined. We found empirically that parameter d depends logarithmically on , the length of the molecule that is fragmented . The number of fragments produced from a specific RNA molecule is determined by , where  is the expectancy of the most abundant fragment size, computed from h and the gamma-function  of :

Second,  breakpoints are sampled uniformly from the interval [0;1[, resulting in relative length fractions  for all  fragments. Third, relative fragment sizes  are transformed from unit space to sizes  that follow a Weibull distribution of shape  by:

where  is a constant of the transformation to ensure that the sizes of the  fragments sum up exactly to the given molecule length . Latter transformation produces a slightly distorted Weibull distribution for the sizes , however the deviation is sufficiently small to be neglected in our applications. 

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