Lab901 has announced the availability of a new technical note entitled ‘The ScreenTape Degradation Value (SDV), a new standard for RNA QC.’
The ScreenTape system is the first fully automated, walk-away solution for gel electrophoresis. Customers simply load their samples and the ScreenTape consumable into the compact TapeStation instrument and, within 1 minute per sample, fully analysed results for protein, RNA and DNA samples are displayed.
The technical note can be downloaded from http://www.lab901.net/images/pdfs/lmm-041-pdf.pdf.
Lab901’s ScreenTape Degradation Value (SDV) is an RNA QC metric that is specifically optimised for, and fully integrated with, Lab901’s ScreenTape R6K platform.
In an independent benchmarking study, the SDV has been shown to be equivalent to the RIN number for total RNA quality assessment and to offer better discrimination for poorer quality samples.
Lab901’s software calculates RNA degradation based on factors that avoid common difficulties associated with the interpretation of RNA electropherograms.
Generation of the SDV is independent of ribosomal peak volumes and therefore avoids the inherent uncertainty of relying on peak boundaries. The result is an RNA QC metric that can reliably and reproducibly help researchers decide which samples can be used for downstream microarray, next generation sequencing and RT-qPCR experiments.
Lab901
1. Wilkes T. M. et al. (2010) BMC Research Notes 3:89
