Donor white blood cell differential is the single largest determinant of whole blood gene expression patterns.

ABSTRACT: It has become widely accepted that sample cellular composition is a significant determinant of the gene expression patterns observed in any transcriptomic experiment performed with bulk tissue. Despite this, many investigations currently performed with whole blood do not experimentally account for possible inter-specimen differences in cellularity, and often assume that any observed gene expression differences are a result of true differences in nuclear transcription. In order to determine how confounding of an assumption this may be, in this study, we recruited a large cohort of human donors (n = 138) and used a combination of next generation sequencing and flow cytometry to quantify and compare the underlying contributions of variance in leukocyte counts versus variance in other biologic

SUBMITTER: O'Connell GC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10872590 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature