Construction of Small RNA cDNA Libraries for High-Throughput Sequencing

Small RNAs (smRNAs) play an essential role in virtually every aspect of growth and development, by regulating gene expression at the post-transcriptional and/or transcriptional level. New high-throughput sequencing technology allows for a comprehensive coverage of smRNAs in any given biological sample, and has been widely used for profiling smRNA populations in various developmental stages, tissue and cell types, or normal and disease states. In this article, we describe the method used in our laboratory to construct smRNA cDNA libraries for high-throughput sequencing.