BOL

RNAseq can be roughly divided into two "types":

Reference genome-based - an assembled genome exists for a species for which an RNAseq experiment is performed. It allows reads to be aligned against the reference genome and significantly improves our ability to reconstruct transcripts. This category would obviously include humans and most model organisms but excludes the majority of truly biologically intereting species (e.g., Hyacinth macaw);

Reference genome-free - no genome assembly for the species of interest is available. In this case one would need to assemble the reads into transcripts using de novo approaches. This type of RNAseq is as much of an art as well as science because assembly is heavily parameter-dependent and difficult to do well.
In this lesson we will focus on the Reference genome-based type of RNA seq.

http://chagall.med.cornell.edu/RNASEQcourse/