I'm working on some RNA analysis of a viral system (human infected cells). I have used HiSat2 and StringTie and am now doing the analysis with Ballgown. In this set up I have two biological replicates of each condition and two variables. There is the treated versus control group and then I have two RNA fractions from each sample (polysome-associated mRNA fraction and total mRNA fraction). With other methods used my collaborators have typically used the total mRNA fraction to normalize the polysome-associated fraction.
In my case I was looking at setting up this comparison using a linear model. For right now I did:
mod = model.matrix(~ pData(bg)$fraction + pData(bg)$treatment)
mod0 = model.matrix(~ pData(bg)$treatment)
Is this reasonable or should I look at implementing a different sort of normalization method? Perhaps something using the standard libadjust first on each sample and then within a sample/treatment combo just dividing the adjusted FPKM values of the polysome fraction by the total? (Which would be similar to what colleages had done previously, although without the library adjustment bit)
Thanks Jeff, appreciate that. I've come in late to this project to do data analysis for some colleagues and the DE analysis is really more exploratory than anything.