RNA-seq: Basic Bioinformatics Analysis.

Quantitative analysis of gene expression is crucial for understanding the molecular mechanisms underlying genome regulation. RNA-seq is a powerful platform for comprehensive investigation of the transcriptome. In this unit, we present a general bioinformatics workflow for the quantitative analysis of RNA-seq data and describe a few current publicly available computational tools applicable at various steps of this workflow. These tools comprise a pipeline for quality assessment and quantitation of RNA-seq data that starts from raw sequencing files and is focused on the identification and analysis of genes that are differentially expressed between biological conditions.