Practice question

RNA sequencing involves isolation of total RNA or poly-A selected RNA, fragmentation, conversion to complementary DNA by reverse transcription, adapter ligation, and high-throughput sequencing. It provides unbiased transcriptome coverage, enabling quantification of expression, discovery of novel transcripts, detection of alternative splicing isoforms, fusion genes, and allelic expression. Ribosomal RNA is typically depleted to avoid dominating reads, not exclusively sequenced. A library exclusively containing ribosomal RNA would defeat the purpose of profiling messenger RNAs and regulatory non-coding RNAs, hence the statement limiting RNA-seq to ribosomal RNA is fundamentally incorrect.