A bioinformatics pipeline for the identification of CHO cell differential gene expression from RNA-Seq data

In recent years the publication of genome sequences for the Chinese hamster and Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cell lines have facilitated study of these biopharmaceutical cell factories with unprecedented resolution. Our understanding of the CHO cell transcriptome, in particular, has rapidly advanced through the application of next-generation sequencing (NGS) technology to characterise RNA expression (RNA-Seq). In this chapter we present a computational pipeline for the analysis of CHO cell RNA-Seq data from the Illumina platform to identify differentially expressed genes. The example data and bioinformatics workflow required to run this analysis are freely available at www.cgcdb.org/rnaseq_analysis_protocol.html.