Cofactor Blog

All Our Libraries

August 6th, 2009

Cofactor has been in business for about 10 months now. In that time we have produced an amazing variety of libraries. Check out a sorted list of them, all 181 as of last week. They span 12 distinct types of libraries. Surprisingly, at least to us, a huge portion of this is RNA. When we were at the genome center, we were really focused on human re-sequencing, but Cofactor’s focus both for software and wet-lab development is now clearly de novo assembly of non-model or emerging-model organisms and their transcriptomes, and expression/splicing/fusion analysis by full-scale RNA-seq.

A quick note about RNA: If you have a larger non-model organism and you would like to begin building genome resources for your work on a tight budget, RNA is a great way to go. You can submit total RNA and after Ribo-depletion or PolyA selection, we can create paired-end Illumina libraries can be assembled into genes. Now exon/exon junctions where there is any alternative splicing will have a gap, but there is still plenty of information to see what genes you have, and even provide a basis for expression work using less expensive single-end reads on the SOLiD mapped back to the assembled transcriptome.

RNA sequencing is like “targeted re-sequencing” that actually works and is actually inexpensive!