What’s More Painful than RNA Extraction?
I recently came across this section from Current Protocols in Molecular Biology on gene expression analysis of a single or few cells. I was intrigued, so I skimmed it a bit. There is one conclusion I came to: the only molecular biology technique more painful than RNA extraction from cells is RNA extraction from one cell. Consider:
Contamination can be reduced by working under a laminar-flow clean bench that has never been exposed to PCR-amplified DNA or cloned DNA, and that is preferably located in a room apart from laboratories where DNA is handled…Unfortunately, contamination might still occur since many enzymes (in particular, reverse transcriptase) contain traces of bacterial DNA/RNA that will be co-amplified with the desired single-cell mRNA….RNase inhibitors are not added because they are frequently derived from human placenta and might therefore be contaminated with human nucleic acids.
Gosh, I hope I never have to do this (knock on wood).
