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I have a computer engineering background, not biology.

I started working on a bioinformatics project recently, which involves de-novo assembly. I came to know the terms Transcriptome and Genome, but I cannot identify the difference between these two.

I know a transcriptome is the set of all messenger RNA molecules in a cell, but am not sure how this is different from a genome.

zx8754
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ThisaruG
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    What information have you researched ? Did Wikipedia pages of Transcriptome and Genome helped you? If not where they didn't help you – llrs May 17 '17 at 08:04
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    This is a rather basic question and I don't think it's a good one for the site, in the message from stack exchange it says "if you ask beginner questions, survey questions, or social-conversation questions, experts and pros will not be interested" – Chris_Rands May 17 '17 at 08:04
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    This is not a bioinformatics question, this is a terminology question and needs to be be better framed. The approaches to transcriptome and genome de novo assembly would be accceptable, but this is a question for Google. –  May 17 '17 at 08:12
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    You can vote to close the question – llrs May 17 '17 at 08:27

2 Answers2

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In brief, the “genome” is the collection of all DNA present in the nucleus and the mitochondria of a somatic cell. The initial product of genome expression is the “transcriptome”, a collection of RNA molecules derived from those genes.

Valentine Svensson
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Prradep
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They are two very different things. Your genome is a large section of about 3 billion DNA nucleotide bases. It has no concept of exon and introns.

Transcriptome is a study of transcriptions. You have introns and exons. We can now talk about alternative splicing and gene expression.

You can think your genome is like a cooking recipe. While it's good to have a good recipe, you can't do much if you don't use it for cooking.

SmallChess
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