Obstacles to detecting isoforms using full-length scRNA-seq data.

Background: Early single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) studies suggested that it was unusual to see more than one isoform being produced from a gene in a single cell, even when multiple isoforms were detected in matched bulk RNA-seq samples. However, these studies generally did not consider the impact of dropouts or isoform quantification errors, potentially confounding the results of these analyses.

Results: In this study, we take a simulation based approach in which we explicitly account for dropouts and isoform quantification errors.