Recent advances in RNA sequence analysis

The latest high-throughput DNA sequencing technology can now be applied on a large scale to capture the complete set of mRNA transcripts in a cell, using a technique called RNA-seq. Although RNA-seq is only 2 years old, it has rapidly swept through the field of genomics, and it is now being used to analyze the transcriptomes of organisms ranging from bacteria to primates. The depth of sequencing allows researchers to quantify the level of expression of genes, to discover alternative isoforms in eukaryotic species, and even to characterize the operon structure of bacterial genomes.