Global and quantitative profiling of polyadenylated RNAs using PAS-seq.

mRNA alternative polyadenylation (APA) has been increasingly recognized as a widespread and evolutionarily conserved mechanism for eukaryotic gene regulation. Here we describe a method called poly(A) site sequencing that can not only map RNA polyadenylation sites on a transcriptome level but also provide quantitative information on the relative abundance of polyadenylated RNAs. This method has been successfully used for both global APA analysis and digital gene expression profiling