Post-transcriptional modification on mRNA has become a field of intense interest in recent years, and next-generation sequencing based technologies are constantly emerging to detect an increasing number of modifications at a transcriptome-wide level. Some of these approaches are based on identification of misincorporation events induced by reverse transcriptase at modified sites. Although conceptually trivial, sensitive and specific identification of such events is a challenge prone to a surprising number of artifacts, which can lead to substantially inflated estimates of the abundance of diverse modifications. Here we discuss the sources of some of these artifacts and delineate approaches to overcome them.

中文翻译：

---

用于检测 mRNA 修饰的错误掺入特征：并不像听起来那么简单

近年来，mRNA 的转录后修饰已成为一个备受关注的领域，并且不断涌现出基于下一代测序的技术，以在转录组范围内检测越来越多的修饰。这些方法中的一些基于在修饰位点处由逆转录酶诱导的错误掺入事件的鉴定。尽管在概念上对此类事件进行微不足道的、敏感和具体的识别是一个挑战，容易产生数量惊人的人工制品，这可能导致对各种修改的丰度的估计大幅夸大。在这里，我们讨论了其中一些工件的来源，并描述了克服它们的方法。