Cofactor has been in business for about 10 months now. In that time we have produced an amazing variety of libraries. Check out a sorted list of them, all 181 as of last week. They span 12 distinct types of libraries. Surprisingly, at least to us, a huge portion of this is RNA. When we were at the genome center, we were really focused on human re-sequencing, but Cofactor’s focus both for software and wet-lab development is now clearly de novo assembly of non-model or emerging-model organisms and their transcriptomes, and expression/splicing/fusion analysis by full-scale RNA-seq.

A quick note about RNA: If you have a larger non-model organism and you would like to begin building genome resources for your work on a tight budget, RNA is a great way to go. You can submit total RNA and after Ribo-depletion or PolyA selection, we can create paired-end Illumina libraries can be assembled into genes. Now exon/exon junctions where there is any alternative splicing will have a gap, but there is still plenty of information to see what genes you have, and even provide a basis for expression work using less expensive single-end reads on the SOLiD mapped back to the assembled transcriptome.

RNA-seq is like “targeted re-sequencing” that actually works and is actually inexpensive!