RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Impact of RNA degradation on measurements of gene expression
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 002261
DO 10.1101/002261
A1 Irene Gallego Romero
A1 Athma A. Pai
A1 Jenny Tung
A1 Yoav Gilad
YR 2014
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2014/01/30/002261.abstract
AB The use of low quality RNA samples in whole-genome gene expression profiling remains controversial. It is unclear if transcript degradation in low quality RNA samples occurs uniformly, in which case the effects of degradation can be normalized, or whether different transcripts are degraded at different rates, potentially biasing measurements of expression levels. This concern has rendered the use of low quality RNA samples in whole-genome expression profiling problematic. Yet, low quality samples are at times the sole means of addressing specific questions – e.g., samples collected in the course of fieldwork. We sought to quantify the impact of variation in RNA quality on estimates of gene expression levels based on RNA-seq data. To do so, we collected expression data from tissue samples that were allowed to decay for varying amounts of time prior to RNA extraction. The RNA samples we collected spanned the entire range of RNA Integrity Number (RIN) values (a quality metric commonly used to assess RNA quality). We observed widespread effects of RNA quality on measurements of gene expression levels, as well as a slight but significant loss of library complexity in more degraded samples. While standard normalizations failed to account for the effects of degradation, we found that a simple linear model that controls for the effects of RIN can correct for the majority of these effects. We conclude that in instances where RIN and the effect of interest are not associated, this approach can help recover biologically meaningful signals in data from degraded RNA samples.