Quantification of Isoforms and Its Impact on Differential Gene Expression Analysis

• Activity Number: 193
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 10, 2015 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Biometrics Section
• Author(s): Munni Begum* and Rebecca Doerge
• Companies: Ball State University and Purdue University
• Keywords: RNA-Seq ; Isoform ; Differential gene expression ; Alternative splicing

Abstract

Next generation sequencing technologies have unprecedented capacity to quantify information at the molecular biology level. In particular, RNA-sequencing (RNA-Seq) technologies have revolutionized the study of transcript abundance in terms of precision and accuracy. In general, RNA-Seq is able to quantify alternative forms of messenger RNA (mRNA) that are also referred to as isoforms, and that are the result of alternative splicing during the transcription. Quantification of isoforms is important for identifying alternative forms of genes and proteins, and may significantly impact the downstream analyses of differential expression across two or more tissues and/or conditions. The effect of isoform abundance inference on downstream differential gene expression analysis will be discussed along with a comparative analysis of the estimation of gene expression levels based on traditional 'Reads Per Kilo-base per Million' (RPKM) data, and isoform data that reflects the aggregation of inferred isoform abundance.