Global GenomicsSM AB (Stockholm, Sweden) announced today the availability of an improved version of its tangerine® whole-genome expression profiling technology, substantially increasing coverage of the human, mouse and rat transcriptomes.

By assembling transcriptomes much like genomes are assembled from individual sequence reads, researchers at Global Genomics were able to discover novel splice variants and alternative polyadenylation sites, as well as to correct sequencing errors in publically available mRNA sequences.

- Although the number of genes has been revised downwards several times, most recently to about 22 000, much of the complexity of mammalian genomes is produced by alternative splicing and alternative polyadenylation, said CTO Sten Linnarsson. Our latest assembly of the human transcriptome contains well over 168 000 different transcripts, all derived from experimental data.

- The new transcriptome assemblies represent a significant step...