ABSTRACT
The transcriptome is the collection of RNA molecules present in a cell. These RNA molecules are the transcripts of the genes that are active in that particular cell or whose recent activity gave rise to transcripts that have not yet been degraded. In the past, the transcriptome has been defined as simply the mRNA content of the cell and hence a reflection of the capacity of the cell to make proteins. In recent years, the term has been expanded to encompass all of a cell’s RNA, acknowledging the greater perception that we now have of the importance of noncoding RNA in diverse cellular activities.
