Dell Genomics At A Glance-Part2 Overview/Quick Guide

Genomics at a glance – Part 2/2 NGS Workflow First step in NGS workflow is to obtain samples for the sequencing. Either DNAs or RNAs need to be extracted from samples. Unfortunately, sequencing technology is not at the stage that we could load samples directly onto a sequencer. The samples have to be sheared and become random ‘short’ fragments. Also, depending on NGS platforms, DNA or RNA short fragments have to be amplified in order to obtain sufficient amount of short DNA/RNA fragments before sequencing. This non glamorous traditional laboratory work is still very critical for obtaining high quality sequencing results. There are small number of different NGS platforms available currently, but Illumina sequencers are the industry leading platform. More or less, these different platforms are based on sequencing by synthesis (SBS) technology except Oxford Nanopore. The fundamental of SBS technology is to capture signals when DNA polymerases add labeled complementary nucleotides on target sequences. After a sequencer generates short sequence reads, these reads need to be mapped onto a reference genome to figure out the origins since a sequencer generates nothing, but millions of short DNA/RNA fragments. Adding meaningful labels on these short sequences, so called aligning, is the beginning of NGS data analysis. This enables downstream analyses. There are many different flavor of aligners available, but not all aligners are RNA-Seq analysis ready. As illustrated on Figure 2, there are many ways to apply NGS in different studies. However, in terms of target sequences, those applications can be organized into two groups, DNA-Seq and RNA-Seq. Only about 9.2 percent of human DNA does something, and little over 1 percent of human genomes codes

Figure 1 DNA-Seq vs RNA-Seq (The original image was obtained form https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/91/Chromosome.gif and modified.)