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Practical aspects of single-cell RT-qPCR analysis
Žucha, Daniel ; Valihrach, Lukáš (advisor) ; Pavlínková, Gabriela (referee)
Recent breakthroughs in the RNA quantification of single cells are rapidly transforming the view on biology and medicine. Flexibility and sensitivity of reverse transcription quantitative PCR (RT-qPCR) make it an ideal method for quantification of single-cell material, but its limits had not been yet fully explored. In this thesis, various factors influencing RT-qPCR performance in single-cell application have been assessed, including conditions of sample collection and processing, importance of quality control, performance of reverse transcription, preamplification and role of qPCR assays. We showed that prolonged time for single cell collection as well as repeated freeze-thaw cycles had negligible effect on RT-qPCR data quality. Direct lysis routinely applied for RNA extraction from single cells may be scaled up to 256 cells. The comprehensive comparison of 11 reverse transcriptases in low RNA input conditions identified 2 best-performing enzymes. Decrease in preamplification volume as well as poor primer design resulted in the loss of sensitivity. Finally, the established workflow has been applied to profile gene expression of astrocytes in mouse model of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) identifying important components of ALS-induced changes to astrocyte transcriptome. Altogether, the thesis...
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The importance and role of reverse transcriptases in gene expression analysis
Žucha, Daniel ; Valihrach, Lukáš (advisor) ; Španielová, Hana (referee)
The continuously advancing field of gene expression analysis enables the evaluation of even the slightest changes that occur in the cell transcriptome. In order to ensure accuracy of the observed biological variances, it is fundamentally important to be aware of the possible biases introduced during sample processing. In gene expression research, the methods of reverse transcription−quantitative PCR (RT−qPCR) and RNA- Sequencing (RNA-Seq) are often the primary choice, mostly because of their high precision and reproducibility. Since these both methods require DNA template, they are coupled with the same initial step - reverse transcription (RT), a reaction producing DNA complementary to its RNA template. It is well known that RT introduces bias. As a result, it is therefore of importance to thoroughly evaluate the effects of these biases. One such annotated source of artifacts is the reverse transcriptase (RTase) itself. However, it has been shown that the enzyme does not account for most of the variance alone. Surprisingly, choice of primers or RNA template may influence the reaction outcome even more than the bias introduced from the enzyme. This is especially the case with recent advances in protein engineering. Production of highly efficient RTases may pronounce the variation originating from...
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