Counting absolute number of molecules using unique molecular identifiers

摘要: Advances in molecular biology have made it easy to identify different DNA or RNA species and copy them. Identification of nucleic acid can be accomplished by reading the sequence; currently millions molecules sequenced a single day using massively parallel sequencing. Efficient copying DNA-molecules arbitrary sequence was possible cloning, polymerase chain reaction. Differences relative abundance large number sequences between two more samples turn measured microarray hybridization and/or tag However, determining absolute present sample has proven much challenging. This is because hard detect individual without them, even harder make defined copies molecules. We show here that this limitation overcome unique identifiers (umis), which each molecule distinct.