TY - JOUR T1 - An inexpensive semi-automated sample processing pipeline for cell-free RNA JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/2020.08.18.256545 SP - 2020.08.18.256545 AU - Mira N. Moufarrej AU - Stephen R. Quake Y1 - 2020/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/09/15/2020.08.18.256545.abstract N2 - Despite advances in automated liquid handling and microfluidics, preparing samples for RNA sequencing at scale generally requires expensive equipment, which is beyond the reach of many academic labs. Manual sample preparation remains a slow, expensive, and error-prone process. Here, we describe a low-cost, semi-automated pipeline to extract cell-free RNA (cfRNA) that increases sample throughput by 12-fold while reducing time spent and cost by nearly 11-fold and 3-fold respectively. This pipeline is generalizable for many nucleic acid extraction applications, thereby increasing the scale of studies, which can be performed in small research labs.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest. ER -