Comparison of frozen and RNALater solid tissue storage methods for use in RNA expression microarrays.docVIP

BMC Genomics BioMedCentral Research article Open Access Comparison of frozen and RNALater solid tissue storage methods for use in RNA expression microarrays George L Mutter*1, David Zahrieh2, Chunmei Liu3, Donna Neuberg2, David Finkelstein3, Heather E Baker1 and Janet A Warrington3 Address: 1Department of Pathology, Brigham and Womens Hospital, Boston, MA, USA, 2Department of Biostatistical Science, Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, MA, USA and 3Affymetrix Inc, Santa Clara, CA, USA Email: George L Mutter* - gmutter@; David Zahrieh - zahrieh@; Chunmei Liu - Chunmei_Liu@; Donna Neuberg - neuberg@; David Finkelstein - David.Finkelstein@STJUDE.ORG; Heather E Baker - crumbsbaker@; Janet A Warrington - janet_warrington@ * Corresponding author Published: 10 November 2004 Received: 03 September 2004 Accepted: 10 November 2004 BMC Genomics 2004, 5:88 doi:10.1186/1471-2164-5-88 This article is available from: /1471-2164/5/88 ? 2004 Mutter et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: Primary human tissues are an invaluable widely used tool for discovery of gene expression patterns which characterize disease states. Tissue processing methods remain unstandardized, leading to unanswered concerns of how to best store collected tissues and maintain reproducibility between laboratories. We subdivided uterine myometrial tissue specimens and stored split aliquots using the most common tissue processing methods (fresh, frozen, RNALater) before comparing quantitative RNA expression profiles on the Affymetrix U133 human expression array. Split samples and inclusion of duplicates within each processing group allowed us to undertake a formal genome-wide an