Quantitative gene profiling of long noncoding RNAs with targeted RNA sequencing

CaptureSeq was used to quantitatively profile transcripts with low expression, resulting in a catalog of long noncoding RNA expression in 20 human tissues. We compared quantitative RT-PCR (qRT-PCR), RNA-seq and capture sequencing (CaptureSeq) in terms of their ability to assemble and quantify long noncoding RNAs and novel coding exons across 20 human tissues. CaptureSeq was superior for the detection and quantification of genes with low expression, showed little technical variation and accurately measured differential expression. This approach expands and refines previous annotations and simultaneously generates an expression atlas.