Table 1.

Methods for detecting and quantifying circRNA

Method	Sensitivity /Accuracy	Throughput	Advantages and Disadvantages	Ref
Northern blotting	Low	Low	Gold standard analysis of circRNA validation;Insensitive to low expression of circRNA	[33, [41, 46–48]
RT-qPCR	Medium-High	Low-Medium	Provide quantitative data; False positive signal may be generated	[47, 49, 50]
RCA	High	Medium	Simple operation, no need for high-precision temperature cycle and additional separation steps.	[51, 52]
NanoString Technologies nCounter assays	High	Medium-High	Quantify circRNA;Requires special equipment and is expensive	[54]
Microarrays	Medium	High	High throughput and high detection efficiency;Difficult to compare between different studies	[46, 55, 56]
FISH	High	Low	Forming stable DNA-RNA hybrid;Highly affected by personnel operations and instrumentation and costly	[57, 58]
RNA-seq	Medium-High	High	Widely used in the discovery of novel circRNAs;Overlap with linear molecular signals, data processing capabilities are required	[59, 60, 62, 64]