Summary.
RNA isolated from frozen human post-mortem brain tissue was used for analysis of five gene products with a recently developed sensitive and competitive RT-PCR technique. Samples varying in post-mortem intervals up to four days from controls, schizophrenics and alcoholics were analyzed. Evaluation of three housekeeping genes, as well as Trk B and Trk C demonstrated that the levels of mRNA transcripts were stable in brain samples at all time periods (one to four days) examined. This observation demonstrates that this RT-PCR protocol is a sensitive and reliable method to study relative amounts of mRNAs. The overall stability of housekeeping transcripts implicates the value of post-mortem brain samples for differential gene expression studies.
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Received April 16, 1998; accepted September 2, 1998
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Schramm, M., Falkai, P., Tepest, R. et al. Stability of RNA transcripts in post-mortem psychiatric brains. J Neural Transm 106, 329–335 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1007/s007020050162
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s007020050162