RNA-Seq Blog Transcriptome Research & Industry News
RNA-seq is currently considered the most powerful, robust and adaptable technique for measuring gene expression and transcription activation at genome-wide level. As the analysis of RNA-seq data is complex, it has prompted a large amount of research on algorithms and methods. This has resulted in a substantial increase in the number of options available at each step of the analysis. Consequently, there is no clear consensus about the most appropriate algorithms and pipelines that should be used to analyse RNA-seq data. In the present study, 192 pipelines using alternative methods were applied to 18 samples from two human cell lines and the performance of the results was evaluated. Raw gene expression signal was quantified by non-parametric statistics to measure precision and accuracy. Differential gene expression performance was estimated by testing 17 differential expression methods. The procedures were validated by qRT-PCR in the same samples. This study weighs up the advantages and disadvantages of the tested algorithms and pipelines providing a comprehensive guide to the different methods and procedures applied to the analysis of RNA-seq data, both for the quantification of the raw expression signal and for the differential gene expression.
RNA-seq analysis workflow. Left panel (1) represents the raw gene expression quantification workflow. Every box contains the algorithms and methods used for the RNA-seq analysis at trimming, alignment, counting, normalization and pseudoalignment levels. The right panel (2) represents the algorithms used for the differential gene expression quantification. *HTSeq was performed in two modes: union and intersection-strict. **EdgeR exact test, edgeR GLM and NOISeq have internally three normalization techniques that were evaluated separately.
Reference: Corchete L.A. et al. Scientific Reports volume 10, Article number: 19737 (2020)
