Accessing the Need of Unique Molecular Index in RNA-Sequencing

RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) has revolutionised transcriptome analysis, revealing important aspects of gene expression and regulation and disease genomics. While it allows for the analysis of more genes simultaneously (multiplexing) than any previous technology, a major limitation of RNA-seq still remains in dealing with common RNA from individual cells and separating real or ?unique? reads from PCR duplicates. It has been hypothesised that Unique Molecular Indexes (UMIs) are essential for accurate analysis of RNA-seq data, but in reality the inherent features of the RNA-seq data might be enough to improve duplication rate.