Project description:Obesity is well recognized as a risk factor for coronary heart disease and mortality. The relationship between abdominal obesity and ischemic stroke remains less clear. Previous publication showed the obesity is an independent, potent risk factor for ischemic stroke in all race-ethnic groups. It is a stronger risk factor than BMI and has a greater effect among younger persons. The goal of this experiment was to compare genome wide enrichment of H3K9ac histone mark profile of white blood cells of healthy controls, patients with obesity and/or stroke in order to understand the histone modifications differences behind the different phenotypes. There were 3 subjects in each group.
Project description:MicroRNAs are important negative regulators of protein coding gene expression, and have been studied intensively over the last few years. To this purpose, different measurement platforms to determine their RNA abundance levels in biological samples have been developed. In this study, we have systematically compared 12 commercially available microRNA expression platforms by measuring an identical set of 20 standardized positive and negative control samples, including human universal reference RNA, human brain RNA and titrations thereof, human serum samples, and synthetic spikes from homologous microRNA family members. We developed novel quality metrics in order to objectively assess platform performance of very different technologies such as small RNA sequencing, RT-qPCR and (microarray) hybridization. We assessed reproducibility, sensitivity, quantitative performance, and specificity. The results indicate that each method has its strengths and weaknesses, which helps guiding informed selection of a quantitative microRNA gene expression platform in function of particular study goals.