Standardizing unique molecular identifiers in SAM flags would benefit more than RNA-Seq

Unique Molecular Identifiers (UMIs) have been incorporated into RNA-Seq experiments to overcome issues with abundance estimation from samples that may have many PCR amplification cycles. However, the use of UMIs in many different types of sequencing experiments could be beneficial, including amplicon sequencing, ATAC-Seq, and ChIP-Seq. Furthermore, UMIs help to overcome artifacts in high-coverage DNA-Seq, and would enable more accurate RNA-Seq genotyping and allele-specific expression calculation. The main advantage of using UMIs is that identical molecules that are true PCR duplicates can be discerned from unique molecules with identical break points.