- Course overview
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- Introduction
- Real-time PCR
- Microarrays
- What is Next Generation DNA Sequencing?
- RNA sequencing
- Biological interpretation of gene expression data
- Genotyping, epigenetic and DNA/RNA-protein interaction methods
- DNA/RNA-protein interactions
- Summary
- Quiz: Check your learning
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- References
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Introduction
Many different types of technologies can be used in functional genomics experiments ranging from real-time PCR to high-throughput technologies such as microarrays and next generation sequencing.
Choosing the right technology
The type of technology that you choose to use will depend on the scale and intent of your experiment. When designing your experiment you will need to think about the advantages and disadvantages of each of the technologies and whether they are suited to the type of experiment that you are planning.
For example, have you thought about how many genes you want to analyse? Real-time PCR is more suited to the analysis of a small number of genes while microarrays and next generation sequencing technologies can analyse thousands of genes simultaneously. Next generation sequencing also has the added advantage in that it allows the discovery of new genes and transcripts.
In this course we discuss the application of real-time PCR, microarrays and next-generation sequencing (with a focus on RNA-sequencing) to functional genomics experiments. We will touch on the advantages and disadvantages of each technology, common analysis methods and look at how these technologies can be applied to a variety of biological questions.