Scientists from EPFL's Institute of Bioengineering say they have developed an alternative to RNA sequencing that is less expensive and time consuming. According to a paper published today in Genome Biology, Bulk RNA Barcoding and sequencing (BRB-seq) is 25 times less expensive than a conventional commercial RNA sequencing technology.
BRB-seq is also quick and preserves strand-specificity. As such, BRB-seq offers a low-cost approach for performing transcriptomics on hundreds of RNA samples, which can increase the number of biological replicates in a single run.
In terms of performance, the scientists found that BRB-seq can detect the same number of genes as "the gold standard" in the field, namely TruSeq Stranded mRNA, at the same sequencing depth and that the technique produces reliable data even with low-quality RNA samples. Moreover, it generates genome-wide transcriptomic data at a cost that is comparable to profiling four genes using RT-qPCR.
In a test, BRB-seq could generate ready-to-sequence genomic libraries for up to 192 samples a day, requiring only two hours of hands-on time. The technique is combined with a user-friendly pipeline for pre-processing and analyzing sequencing data, allowing result acquisition in a single day.
"Since its release, dozens of labs and companies have already contacted us to help them implement the BRB-seq approach," says Bart Deplancke. "Because of BRB-seq's low cost, these researchers realized that they could now analyze many more samples with the same budget, thus vastly increasing the scope and reproducibility of their experiments. We therefore anticipate that BRB-seq or a comparable approach will over the longer term become standard in any molecular biology lab and replace RT-qPCR as the first gene expression profiling option."
Image: The BRB-seq method. Image courtesy of B. Deplancke/EPFL.