Studies of individual transcripts were being performed several decades before any transcriptomics approaches were available. Libraries of silkmoth mRNA transcripts were collected and converted to complementary DNA (cDNA) for storage using reverse transcriptase in the late 1970s. In the 1980s, low-throughput sequencing using the Sanger method was used to sequence random transcripts, producing expressed sequence tags (ESTs). The Sanger method of sequencing was predominant until the advent of high-throughput methods such as sequencing by synthesis (Solexa/Illumina). ESTs came to prominence during the 1990s as an efficient method to determine the gene content of an organism without sequencing the entire genome. Amounts of individual transcripts were quantified using Northern blotting, nylon membrane arrays, and later reverse transcriptase quantitative PCR (RT-qPCR) methods, but these methods are laborious and can only capture a tiny subsection of a transcriptome. Consequently, the manner in which a transcriptome as a whole is expressed and regulated remained unknown until higher-throughput techniques were developed.