It is amazing how many things can go wrong during sequencing. In my experience, samples mix-ups and contaminations are some of the most common. And then of course there are those mysterious ones, for which no one knows what went wrong. Here are few RNA-seq control measures you might not have thought of, but which has helped us in the past to identify sources of faulty results: Antisense transcription. Sure you check the rate of antisense transcription, but did you know that t

They called it "RNA velocity" - the scientists from Karolinska Institute and Harvard Medical School who developed a novel approach to determine whether the transcription of the gene just started or has been going on for a while. What I love about this method is that it doesn't require any additional steps in sample preparation or sequencing - it is utilizing the data that we have often discard as garbage - the intronic reads. If gene transcription just started, majority of tr