Lab901's Screentape automated gel electrophoresis system has demonstrated equivalence to the accepted standard of measurement of RNA sample quality control prior to microarray analysis.
A peer-reviewed paper published in BMC Research Notes set out to evaluate the effectiveness of the Screentape Degradation Value (SDV) as a measurement of RNA quality, compared with the Agilent Bioanalyzer's RIN number.
The authors concluded that the Screentape platform is comparable to the Bioanalyzer platform in terms of reproducibility and discrimination between the different levels of RNA degradation.
They added that the robust nature of the SDV metric qualifies it as an alternative metric for RNA sample quality control, and a useful predictor of downstream microarray performance.
The paper went on to show that SDV and RIN scales demonstrated comparable discrimination between differently treated samples, with the SDV exhibiting potentially higher discrimination for more degraded samples, which are often obtained when using biopsies, laser micro-dissected samples or FFPE-treated tissue as the starting material.
Increasing SDV values correlated with a decrease in microarray sample labelling efficiency and an increase in numbers of differentially expressed genes.
Lab901's Screentape R6K is a next-generation platform for RNA QC that automatically delivers the SDV, an objective quality metric for total RNA samples.
The Screentape system removes steps such as gel reagent prep, chip priming and chip-vortexing, making the electrophoresis easier and faster.
In addition, cross-priming and sample carry-over problems are eliminated as Screentape R6K uses an individually sealed micro-gel for each sample analysis, improving data quality and reproducibility.
Because of this, Lab901's Screentape device can be used more than once, with researchers able to run as little as one or two samples, reserving the rest of the channels (16 in total) for future experiments.
Researchers therefore do not need to batch samples together or throw away unused portions of the consumable, which improves RNA QC workflow and reduces waste and costs.
