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What is unigene

I do not understand precisely what is a unigene? I've been looking on the internet but I always find UniGene NCBI database as a result. Does anyone know the definition of what is a unigene?

gene rna-seq

1 answer

In the most strict way (biological) a unigene is a unique transcript that is transcribed from a genome. So that should corresponds to an isoform (or gene if there are no isoforms).

however, in (transcript) assembly context people often refer to a unigene as a uniquely assembled transcript which not necessarily corresponds to the biological interpretation (== due to artifacts you could end up with several assembled transcripts for the same biological unigene)

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