New technique for carrying out gene-expression profiling

A novel technique for carrying out gene-expression profiling is set to challenge the market dominance of the current, widely used methodology, reports Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News (GEN).

Some scientists believe that digital gene-expression profiling, a fully quantitative approach for gene-expression analysis, will eventually rival microarrays in this application area, according to the April 1 issue of GEN.

"Digital gene expression technologies are certainly catching the attention of the life science research community," says John Sterling, Editor in Chief of GEN . "The approach looks to be especially appealing to those working in the area of transcriptomics.

A group of Dutch researchers compared deep sequencing-based gene-expression analysis using the Illumina whole genome sequencer to five microarray-based platforms. They concluded that deep sequencing provides a major advance in robustness, comparability, and richness of expression profiling data. The scientists predict that with the continuously increasing number of reads at reduced costs, RNASeq, a.k.a. whole transcriptome shotgun sequencing, will become affordable for standard differential gene-expression analysis.

DNAStar recently introduced QSeq, the first product to use the company's disk sort alignment algorithm for quantitative RNASeq applications and digital gene-expression experiments. DNAStar officials view RNASeq as being is in the validation stage.