This online seminar discusses how improvements on the front end and back end of the sequencing workflow can lead to better RNA-seq results.

Our first speaker, Alex Siebold, manager of the North American Genomics Field Applications Team at Agilent, presents a new direct-to-capture library prep method for whole-transcriptome RNA-seq that leverages Agilent’s SureSelect target enrichment technology.

Results from initial studies suggest the method provides enhanced sensitivity to low-level transcripts, fusions, and splice variants in addition to providing greater uniformity of coverage across the entire transcript vs. classical PolyA-mediated library prep strategies.

Our second speaker, Ravi Madduri, CTO at Navipoint Genomics and Senior Fellow at the University of Chicago Computation Institute, discusses an analytical pipeline that he and his team developed for analyzing gene expression changes and detecting fusion transcripts at the whole-transcriptome level. The pipeline, which is based on the Navipoint Genomics platform and the Cartagenia Bench environment, analyzes all samples in parallel and improves reporting quality with high confidence values and fewer false negatives.

Our panelists discuss how this combined whole-transcriptome workflow has been tested on high- and low-quality formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded samples and will also provide QC results from a comparison of the Agilent SureSelect RNA-Seq platform with Illumina’s TruSeq chemistry. Agilent’s v6 exome design was processed with the two chemistries and then analyzed and reported through the same cloud-based pipeline.