A Stochastic Approach to Count RNA Molecules Using DNA Sequencing Methods

Estimating the number of congeneric mRNA molecules in a preparation is an essential task in DNA technology and biochemistry. However, DNA sequencing methods can only distinguish molecules with different sequences or of different lengths. Recently, it was shown that it is possible to combine RNA molecules with short DNA molecules (tags) such that, with high probability, any two RNA molecules are combined with tags having different sequences. For this technique, we propose a statistical estimator and a confidence interval to determine the number of mRNA molecules in a preparation.