Nm. Zhou et al., A COMPETITIVE RT-PCR METHOD FOR THE QUANTITATIVE-ANALYSIS OF CYTOKINEMESSENGER-RNAS IN MOUSE-TISSUES, Cytokine, 9(3), 1997, pp. 212-218
The authors describe the design and validation of a competitive RT-PCR
method for the efficient and reproducible quantitation of mRNA molecu
les of IFN-gamma, TNF-alpha, IL-4 and IL-IO in mouse spleen RNA extrac
ts, Before being subjected to RT-PCR, the RNA extracts were supplement
ed with internal control RNAs (IC-RNAs), which were constructed by ins
erting DKA fragments in the cDNA of the respective cytokines. The effi
ciency of amplification of the target and the IC-RNA was shown to rema
in equal over a wide range of cycle numbers, Reproducibility was such
that differences in mRNA contents that were greater than 17% could be
detected between two RNA samples run in parallel, Normal mouse spleen
tissue was found to contain 10(7)-10(8) molecules of TNF-alpha, IFN-ga
mma, IL-4 and IL-IO mRNA per pg total RNA extracted, Injection of anim
als with anti-CD3 antibody, a well-known cytokine inducer, resulted in
a moderate increase in TNF-alpha and IL-10 mRNA levels (14- and 24-fo
ld, respectively), and in a substantially greater increase in the leve
ls of mRNA for IL-4 and IFN-gamma (199- and 851-fold, respectively), T
hese results demonstrate an accurate and reliable quantitation of cyto
kine mRNA levels in animal tissues. (C) 1997 Academic Press Limited.