Evidence map›Paper›PMID 42741932›Full record

ArticleJournal of computational biology : a journal of computational molecular cell biology2026

Unique Molecular Identifiers Don't Need to be Unique: A Collision-Aware Estimator for RNA-Seq Quantification.

Dylan Agyemang, Rafael A Irizarry, Tavor Z Baharav

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Article in Journal of computational biology : a journal of computational molecular cell biology, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.

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0citing papers in PubMed
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1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

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3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

0 citing papers in PubMed.

No citing paper in PubMed yet.

4 · The record

Corrections and comments

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

3 authors.

Dylan AgyemangDepartment of Statistics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA.
Rafael A IrizarryDepartment of Biostatistics, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
Tavor Z BaharavDepartment of Data Science, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.ORCID 0000-0001-8924-0243

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

RNA-sequencing (RNA-seq) relies on Unique Molecular Identifiers (UMIs) to accurately quantify gene expression after PCR amplification. Longer UMIs minimize collisions, where two distinct transcripts are assigned the same UMI, at the expense of increased sequencing and synthesis costs. However, it is not clear how long UMIs need to be in practice, especially given the nonuniformity of the empirical UMI distribution. In this work, we develop a method-of-moments estimator that accounts for UMI collisions, accurately quantifying gene expression and preserving downstream biological insights. We show that UMIs need not be unique: shorter UMIs can be used with a more sophisticated estimator.

Indexed as

method-of-momentsPCRsingle-cell RNA sequencingunique molecular identifier

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Registered trials

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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.