(Asmann, et al., 2009). The absence of significant background signal, more relaxed limits for quantification, and the greater range of expression levels that might be detected compared to microarrays allow the detection of genes expressed either at very low or high levels (’t Hoen, et al., 2008; Asmann, et al., 2009; Marioni, Mason, Mane, Stephens, & Gilad, 2008). Additionally, the results of high-throughput sequencing of the transcriptome are characterized by a high level of reproducibility both for technical and biological replicates (Marioni, et al., 2008). Furthermore, RNA-Seq produces information on the level of gene expression as either a raw number of reads (i.e., relative) or the number of reads normalized by the transcript length (i.e., adjusted for the length of the sequence whose transcript is being sequenced) and total count of reads (i.e., absolute); this capability increases the comparability of data obtained by different laboratories and in different experiments in the same laboratory.
