1. The document presents an annotation-agnostic method called derfinder to identify differentially expressed regions (DERs) of the genome using RNA-seq data, even with potentially incomplete transcriptome annotation.
2. Applying derfinder to BrainSpan and GTEx data identified intronic DERs that can differentiate tissues independently of nearby exonic regions.
3. Tools were developed for reproducible reporting of DER results, and simulations showed the method maintains power comparable to fully annotated methods.