Comparison of oligonucleotide microarray and RNA-seq technologies in the context of gene expression analysis

Abstract

For more than a decade, the microarray technology has been widely used for genome-wide gene expression profiling of several experimental systems. Transcript abundance measurement is currently revolutionized by RNA-seq technology which enables the sequencing of the whole transcriptome. The purpose of the described research was to compare the Affymetrix GeneTitan array and the Illumina HiSeq-2000 sequencing technologies in the context of gene expression analysis. Overall, this study shows that RNA-seq is a very powerful technology since it is more sensitive to detect low and differential expressed transcripts/genes compared to the Affymetrix GeneTitan technology.