How does RNA-Seq contribute to the understanding of gene expression patterns?

RNA-seq helps determine gene expression patterns based on the number of reads that map to each transcript sequence. It provides comprehensive transcriptome profiling, allowing researchers to detect and quantify the expression of both protein-coding and non-coding RNA molecules. The identification of both novel and known transcripts are carried out in order to provide a better understanding of the transcriptome. By analyzing novel sequence reads, researchers can identify previously unknown genes and long-coding RNAs. RNA-seq allows for the quantitative measurement of gene expression analysis, allowing researchers to estimate the abundance of each RNA molecule. This information is helpful to later compare gene expression levels between different genes and reveal changes in gene expression patterns. Additionally, scRNA-seq provides information about noise during transcriptional responses, and splicing patterns. Studying co-expression patterns at the single-cell level may allow for identification of co-regulated gene modules and may also help identify interference of gene-regulatory networks.