Next Generation Sequencing Facilitates Quantitative Analysis of Wild and intervertebral disc degeneration mice

Purpose: Next-generation sequencing (NGS) has revolutionized systems-based analysis of cellular pathways. The goals of this study are to compare NGS-derived intervertebral disc transcriptome profiling (RNA-seq) to microarray and quantitative reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (qRT–PCR) methods and to evaluate protocols for optimal high-throughput data analysis Methods: Retinal mRNA profiles of 21-day-old Wild and intervertebral disc degeneration mice were generated by deep sequencing, in triplicate, using Illumina GAIIx. The sequence reads that passed quality filters were analyzed at the transcript isoform level with two methods: Burrows–Wheeler Aligner (BWA) followed by ANOVA (ANOVA) and TopHat followed by Cufflinks. qRT–PCR validation was performed using TaqMan and SYBR Green assays