Abstract

The Impact of Ligation Bias on Plant Small RNA Sequencing

Tamas Dalmay, Director/Professor, University of East Anglia

Next generation sequencing became the most popular approach to profile the expression of small non-coding RNAs (sRNAs). However, cDNA libraries of sRNAs are biased and this is based on the ability of individual sRNAs to form stable secondary structures with the adapters. We demonstrated that adding degenerated nucleotides to the adapters reduce the ligation bias by allowing different sequences to form a stable structure with the adapters. The impact of this ligation bias on sequencing plant sRNAs will be presented.