English: Within the organisms, genes are transcribed and spliced (in eukaryotes) to produce mature mRNA transcripts (red). The mRNA is extracted from the organism and reverse transcriptase is used to copy the mRNA into stable ds-cDNA (blue). In SAGE, the ds-cDNA is digested by restriction enzymes (at location ‘X’ and ‘X’+11) to produce 11-nucleotide ‘digitag’ fragments. These digitags are concatenated and sequences using long-read sanger sequencing (different shades of blue indicate digitags from different genes). The sequences are deconvoluted to find the occurrence number of each digitag. Digitag can be used to report on transcription of the gene that the digitag came from is known.^[1]