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I had a colleague ask me recently whether mRNAs could be sequenced directly. I found this Nature paper[1] published by Helicos in 2009, in which they describe their developments in the area. It's been several years since this was published, and yet RNAseq and most other transcriptomic analysis is still done by first reverse transcribing RNA into complementary DNA.

What is the current state of RNA sequencing? Has Helicos failed to deliver on their technology? Have any other platforms risen to the challenge (or attempted to do so)? Or is the technology successfully in production and still simply overshadowed by the wide adoption of traditional cDNA-based sequencing methods?

Ozsolak F, Platt AR, Jones DR, Reifenberger JG, Sass LE, McInerney P, Thompson JF, Bowers J, Jarosz M, Milos PM. 2009. Direct RNA sequencing. Nature, 461, 814-818, doi:10.1038/nature08390.

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Helicos stopped shipping reagents around 2010-2011, as they couldn't compete with Illumina. For now it seems that reverse transcription -> Illumina-sequenced cDNA is so much cheaper than any other option, that's the method that is dominant.

Oxford Nanopore has discussed direct RNA profiling, but unfortunately their first product still hasn't shipped (for DNA or otherwise), and they haven't even released data, it may be a little while longer.

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There was a paper that just came out about in situ RNA seq, but at the moment the limit of the sequence obtained is an underwhelming 4 bp. Still, its a cool technique and if it is advanced it could be useful in single cell RNA-seq, without the need of amplification or library prep

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23852452

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