Section: New Results

Simulating RNA-seq experiments

RNAseq experiments now enable to characterise the RNA complement of a cell. However, the series of steps (fragmentation, reverse transcription, sequencing) that separate the initial RNA molecules from the short DNA reads obtained in fine are not well understood although it is widely accepted that they contribute to generating noise in the signal. We introduced the FluxSimulator [14] , a computer program able to reproduce the biases seen in RNAseq data. This pipeline should prove useful both to produce realistic data on which to test programs which aim at reconstructing RNA from short reads, and suggest ways of improving the experimental steps so that they produce less noise.