Project description:Profiling of mRNA abundances with high-throughput platforms such as microarrays and RNA-Seq has become an important tool in both basic and biomedical research. However these platforms remain prone to systematic errors, and have challenges in clinical and industrial application. As a result it is standard practice to validate a subset of key results using alternate technologies. Similarly, clinical and industrial applications typically involve transitions from high-throughput discovery platform to medium-throughput validation ones. These medium-throughput validation platforms have high technical reproducibility and reduced sample input needs, and low sensitivity to sample-quality (e.g. for processing FFPE specimens). Unfortunately, while medium-throughput platforms have proliferated, there are no comprehensive comparisons of them. Here we fill that gap by comparing two key medium-throughput platforms – NanoString’s nCounter Analysis System and ABI’s OpenArray System – to gold-standard quantitative real-time RT-PCR.
Project description:Profiling of mRNA abundances with high-throughput platforms such as microarrays and RNA-Seq has become an important tool in both basic and biomedical research. However these platforms remain prone to systematic errors, and have challenges in clinical and industrial application. As a result it is standard practice to validate a subset of key results using alternate technologies. Similarly, clinical and industrial applications typically involve transitions from high-throughput discovery platform to medium-throughput validation ones. These medium-throughput validation platforms have high technical reproducibility and reduced sample input needs, and low sensitivity to sample-quality (e.g. for processing FFPE specimens). Unfortunately, while medium-throughput platforms have proliferated, there are no comprehensive comparisons of them. Here we present ABI's OpenArray and qPCR systems.