DNA sequencing has encountered tremendous progress in the recent years. Always faster sequencing and falling price per base have brought sequencing as a mainstream tool. Beside plain genome sequencing, a lot of related applications have arisen. RNA sequencing (RNAseq) is one of those variants where the probed quantity are the RNA molecules present in the cell, giving a direct insight onto genetic regulatory mechanisms. Despite the increasingly common use of this technology, resulting signals are often limited to rather crude comparison of expression levels of annotated genes.
We show that a lot more information can be retrieved from such type of experiments. This includes accurate determination of transcription starts and ends as well as discovery of novel --- not annotated --- RNA transcripts, let them be messenger RNA (mRNA), antisense RNA (asRNA) or non-coding RNA (ncRNA).
Finally, following earlier work that lead to the 5'tagRACE method , we show that the method can be associated to RNAseq in order to obtain information about RNA transcription and processing at an unprecedented level of details.
