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What is Digital Gene Expression?

So one of the postdoc in our lab is trying to get RNA sequenced with a provider who seems to use Digital Gene Expression (DGE) technique for RNA-sequencing. I would be handling the Bioinformatics analysis for the sequenced data, so I am curious to know what DGE is? For DGE does the sequencer directly spits out expression information without going through the usual bioinformatics pipeline?

rna-seq sequencing next-gen
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updated by Benn Benn • written by halo22 halo22

Probably just a marketing term. Digital part here must be referring to a numerical count of reads since you are able to identify them as coming from a specific gene/region (as long as they map uniquely).

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written by GenoMax GenoMax

1 answer

Digital gene expression is RNAseq analysis based on statistical methods that use raw count data, such as edgeR. If you read the manual of edgeR you'll see that they call it digital gene expression analysis.

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written by Benn Benn

Instead of getting an analog intensity value that is then converted to an integer (like in microarrays), you are able to count reads that overlap a feature (e.g. exon) in the genome. Direct counting these reads is the "digital" estimate of gene expression.

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written by GenoMax GenoMax

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