Abstract
Researchers from the lab of Bart Deplancke, Ph.D., at the École Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) Institute of Bioengineering say they have developed a new method called Bulk RNA Barcoding and sequencing (BRB-seq) which is 25 times less expensive than conventional commercial RNA sequencing technology.
Among its many advantages, BRB-seq is quick and preserves strand-specificity, the scientists noted. As such, BRB-seq offers a low-cost approach for performing transcriptomics on hundreds of RNA samples, which can increase the number of biological replicates (and therefore experimental accuracy) in a single run, explained Deplancke, whose team’s work appears in Genome Biology.
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The scientists report that BRB-seq can detect the same number of genes as commercial technology at the same sequencing depth and that the technique produces reliable data even with low-quality RNA samples. It can also generate genome-wide transcriptomic data at a cost that is comparable to profiling four genes using RT-qPCR, which is currently a standard, but low-throughput method for measuring gene expression.