Gene Expression and Profiling

Abstract

Transcriptomics analysis has been widely applied to explore the unknown genes or factors in various biological processes, traits, diseases, and drug treatment. By screening entire RNAs, this technique implicates novel genes and pathways related to a particular condition. Two major types of transcriptomic profiling methods are microarray and RNA sequencing. The two approaches generates and preprocess their respective raw data quite differently, but further analysis is nearly identical. In this chapter, we briefly describe the principles of both methods and compare the differences between them. Since RNA quality is a key practical factor in transcriptomic study, we also introduce isolation and quality control methods and popular software packages for each step in the data analysis process. Finally, we provide an example of a clinical project which used transcriptomics approach to study a disease etiology.