Effects of early death on RNA

[amei]

Hi all,

I had small number of mice that were found dead in the middle of the study and if I wanted to isolate the RNA (for RT-PCR and real time PCR analyses, subsequently); would the result still be accurate?
Please let me know your thoughts, any feedback would be appreciated! Thank you so much!

[obama]

it will easy to answer,if you say what was time period between death of mouse and RNA isolation.

[amei]

When we found a mouse dead, we immediately collect the tissues and put them in -80C for storage and for subsequent RNA analysis (could be several weeks later or months..).

[mmorgan]

I think it depends what tissue you're looking at. If it's brain forget it.

Chances are that since you're finding them dead, they died overnight meaning they could have been dead for several hours.

My advice would be don't waste your time / money analyzing degraded tissues. You might be able to do some histopathology on the tissues if they were fixed but I would bet that the gene expression profiles will be completely perturbed.