%0 Journal Article
%T The RIN: an RNA integrity number for assigning integrity values to RNA measurements
%A Andreas Schroeder
%A Odilo Mueller
%A Susanne Stocker
%A Ruediger Salowsky
%A Michael Leiber
%A Marcus Gassmann
%A Samar Lightfoot
%A Wolfram Menzel
%A Martin Granzow
%A Thomas Ragg
%J BMC Molecular Biology
%D 2006
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1471-2199-7-3
%X A method is introduced that automatically selects features from signal measurements and constructs regression models based on a Bayesian learning technique. Feature spaces of different dimensionality are compared in the Bayesian framework, which allows selecting a final feature combination corresponding to models with high posterior probability.This approach is applied to a large collection of electrophoretic RNA measurements recorded with an Agilent 2100 bioanalyzer to extract an algorithm that describes RNA integrity. The resulting algorithm is a user-independent, automated and reliable procedure for standardization of RNA quality control that allows the calculation of an RNA integrity number (RIN).Our results show the importance of taking characteristics of several regions of the recorded electropherogram into account in order to get a robust and reliable prediction of RNA integrity, especially if compared to traditional methods.The RNA molecule plays a critical role in transferring information encoded in the genome (DNA) to the many different forms of proteins. After extracting RNA from cells by various methods, scientists are provided with a direct measure of cellular activity using gene expression measurement techniques. Among these, real-time PCR and DNA microarrays are the most widely used techniques.RNA is a thermodynamically stable molecule, which is, however, rapidly digested in the presence of the nearly ubiquitous RNase enzymes. As a result, shorter fragments of RNA commonly occur in a sample, which can potentially compromise results of downstream applications [1,2]. In order to evaluate the degree of degradation, electrophoretic methods have been applied that separate the samples according to the size of the comprised molecules.Historically, RNA integrity is evaluated using agarose gel electrophoresis stained with ethidium bromide, which produces a certain banding pattern [3]. Typically, gel images show two bands comprising the 28S and 18S ribosomal RN
%U http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2199/7/3