When I asked a molecular biologist and long time respected colleague if he was conducting RNA-Seq experiments on his interesting samples he responded “RNA-Seq sucks”. It wasn’t the answer I was expecting. I (like many others) was approaching the advantages of RNA-Seq from a technology-end. But my colleague was coming at it from a molecular biology perspective, and there it brushed against some fundamental problems.

RNA-Seq is a wild west as many people in our industry describe it. The lack of standardization, controls, and assessment results in a real mess and lack of confidence in the results and conclusions derived from an RNA-Seq experiment. But RNA-Seq experiments are worthwhile and abound. In fact, Cofactor Genomics has performed more RNA-Seq experiments than any other next-gen application. But my colleague had laid a smackdown like only an old friend could give. Sure RNA-Seq addressed some of the shortcomings of previous approaches but at the same time it brought on a whole new set of challenges that did not seem to be addressed by anybody performing RNA-Seq.

Significant challenges, however, are often synonymous with significant opportunity and over the last three years we have identified fundamental flaws that needed to be addressed to have consistency and confidence in the differential expression candidates our fellow scientists (like my colleague) demanded. We’re now ready to share these key challenges and advances we’ve identified through our R&D efforts. Over the next few weeks we’ll be outlining each of the major challenges of RNA-Seq on this blog. Then on July 26th we’ll summarize our findings and present our solution in our RNA-Seq DX^TM webinar.I hope you’ll join us.

Register to attend the webinar here.

July 26th 12-1 CST.