Descripción
This is a collection of short essays written by the author in the area of RNA sequencing (RNA-seq). Each essay is about 500 to 800 words long, and discuss one or two issues in a focused manner. The collection spans different aspects of RNA-seq including difficulties in data analysis, how RNA-seq data informs metabolic engineering research, and cancer diagnostics, as well as nuanced aspects of the assay that made a big difference to obtained results. Overall, the book is divided into three parts: (i) data processing, (ii) applications of RNA-seq, and (iii) challenges. In the first part, issues related to data processing aspects of RNA-seq is touched on. These include the need for whole genome sequence in aiding RNA-seq data processing to the requirement for high performance computing to process the large number of reads in RNA-seq. Additional issues include how quality of processed data is influenced by number of reads processed. The second part of the book describes different applications of RNA-seq such as understanding gene expression pattern in different contexts such as development or response to environmental challenges, ribosome profiling, spatial transcriptomics, single cell RNA-seq, and in situ RNA-seq. In the final part of the book, challenges affecting current implementation of RNA-seq are detailed. These challenges typically arise from methodological limitations of the technique in different experimental contexts. For example, lack of RNA material may affect quality of single cell RNA-seq, or the requirement of high fidelity reverse transcriptase in ensuring quality of sequenced reads in RNA-seq.