RNA Sequence Analysis

RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) is currently the default approach to gene expression profiling and analysis. RNA-seq measures the expression levels of genes and gives valuable information about gene alternative splicing events in tissues. Recently, RNA sequencing technology has included transcript profiling from individual cells (scRNA-seq) to study how expression variation and cellular heterogeneity are associated with a phenotype.

The applications of gene expression analysis are broad but they all start with an experiment that compares two conditions, such as a case vs. control group, then identifies a list of differentially expressed genes that explain the difference between the two conditions. A complementary step is to identify co-expressed genes and perform functional enrichment of known biological processes and pathway databases using the list of differentially expressed genes.