I am dealing with small RNA sequencing data (from low input samples) and this was run through the exceRpt pipeline which produces the "exceRpt_miRNA_ReadCounts". However, the numbers in this count matrix are not integers which Deseq2 will not accept.

Does anyone know what the correct thing to do here is?

Hi,

Is this the pipeline you are referring to? https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cels.2019.03.004

If so, it looks like it does provide read counts, but also some RPM (reads per million) files as shown in Table 1. Do you counts contain decimals? If not, it could be that DESeq2 is expecting an integer counts matrix and exceRpt is providing an numeric counts matrix.

Here's a small example of how two matrices (mat and mat2) look identical to us, but one of them has numeric and the other one has integer values.

## Numeric matrix
mat <- matrix(as.numeric(1:9), ncol = 3)
## Integer matrix
mat2 <- matrix(as.integer(1:9), ncol = 3)

## They look identical
mat
#>      [,1] [,2] [,3]
#> [1,]    1    4    7
#> [2,]    2    5    8
#> [3,]    3    6    9
mat2
#>      [,1] [,2] [,3]
#> [1,]    1    4    7
#> [2,]    2    5    8
#> [3,]    3    6    9

## But their values are not the same
class(mat[, 1])
#> [1] "numeric"
class(mat2[, 2])
#> [1] "integer"

## We can convert the numeric matrix into an integer one
mat3 <- matrix(as.integer(mat), ncol = 3)
identical(mat2, mat3)
#> [1] TRUE

Best, Leo

PS This was an example for my team on learning how to help others.