Past exam of the systems biology course of the University of Cambridge / 2024 / Paper 4 / Section I / 1.14 / Solution 2026-10-20
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Two useful changes would be:
  • Show patient estimates together with matched, relevant cell-type controls and an independent measurement of modification at prespecified or held-out loci. Display uncertainty and all evaluated loci, or state a selection rule independent of the reported contrast. This separates genuine agreement from selection of high xPore values and from unrelated cell-background effects.
  • Add performance across measured RNA-input levels for the same biological materials, with biological and technical replication, read coverage and failure rates reported. This tests the low-input part of the claim directly rather than inferring it from the heatmap.
A single additional knockout row would not address both independent accuracy and input dependence.
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Read coverage Created 2026-10-20 Updated 2026-11-05
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Read coverage describes how sequencing reads overlap a target sequence. Per-base depth counts overlapping reads at each position, whereas breadth asks what fraction of target positions receives specified support. For example, high average depth can coexist with an uncovered exon if sampling is uneven. In RNA sequencing, coverage also reflects transcript abundance, processing and library preparation, so absence of reads is not automatically evidence that a genomic region is absent. [ref]
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