Differential Transcriptome Profiling for Identification of Cellulose Degrading Enzymes in Ctenolepisma longicaudata

Whole-transcriptome shotgun sequencing, or RNA-seq, is a next-generation sequencing technique that enables quantitative determination of total transcripts present to serve as a proxy for the level of expression of the corresponding gene in a cell, tissue, or whole organism (Wang et al., 2009). Compared with microarrays and other hybridization-based approaches, RNA-seq does not suffer from cross-hybridization bias and is not limited by availability of genomic resources for the organism studied (Ekblom and Galindo, 2011), making this technique very attractive in studying non-model organisms for which genomic data are scarce.