Transcriptome assembly strategies for precision medicine

Abstract

Background: Precision medicine approach holds great promise to tailored diagnosis, treatment and prevention. Individuals can be vastly different in their genomic information and genetic mechanisms hence having unique transcriptomic signatures. The development of precision medicine has demanded moving beyond DNA sequencing (DNA-Seq) to much more pointed RNA-sequencing (RNA-Seq) [Cell, 2017, 168: 584–599].

Results: Here we conduct a brief survey on the recent methodology development of transcriptome assembly approach using RNA-Seq.

Conclusions: Since transcriptomes in human disease are highly complex, dynamic and diverse, transcriptome assembly is playing an increasingly important role in precision medicine research to dissect the molecular mechanisms of the human diseases.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

precision medicine / transcriptome assembly / RNA-Seq / de novo / De Bruijn

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This paper is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grand Nos. 1637312 and 1451316.

COMPLIANCE WITH ETHICS GUIDELINES

The authors Lu Wang, Lipi Acharya, Changxin Bai and Dongxiao Zhu declare that they have no conflict of interests.

This article is a review article and does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

2017 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg