Adult Drosophila melanogaster testis RNA sequencing

The goal was to determine the expression states of protein coding genes in a well-studied complex organ to benchmark a hierarchical Bayesian method for estimating gene expression states. Because much is known about the functional genetics of Drosophila melanogaster testes we chose this organ for benchmarking. The stem cell niche within the testes contains a small number of cells and there are ample genes with stem cell niche restricted expression and thus expected to have low expression in the bulk transcriptome of the testis. This provides a good way to test the sensitivity of our method to detect active but low-expressed genes.