Lab901's Screentape(R) Excels As Gold Standard Measure Of RNA Quality
Edinburgh, UK – 20 April 2010 – In a recently published paper, Lab901’s ScreenTape® automated gel electrophoresis system demonstrated equivalence to - and improvements on - the accepted standard measurement of RNA sample quality control prior to microarray analysis.
The peer-reviewed paper, published in BMC Research Notes,1 set out to evaluate the effectiveness of the ScreenTape Degradation Value (SDV) as a measurement of RNA quality, compared to 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 different levels of RNA degradation. 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 which automatically delivers the ScreenTape Degradation Value (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 much 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, unlike many chip-based systems, 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 (sixteen 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 as well as cost.
For more information on Lab901’s range of ScreenTape products for automated RNA QC, SDS-PAGE and multiplex PCR diagnostics, please visit www.lab901.com.
1. Wilkes T. M., Devonshire A. S., Ellison L. R. and Foy C. A. Evaluation of a novel approach for the measurement of RNA quality. BMC Research Notes 3:89 (2010)
About Lab901
Lab901 is a leading laboratory automation company. Lab901 has been selling its D800 and DS12 DNA ScreenTape products into the PCR diagnostics market for the last 2 years and to date has shipped over 110 systems globally. ScreenTape R6K for RNA QC is the latest product to be developed and manufactured at Lab901’s clean room production facility in Edinburgh, United Kingdom.
Contact: Richard Rowling +44 131 448 2904
www.lab901.com