Understand gene expression regulation:
Small RNA’s are <100 nucleotides in length, and are usually non-coding RNA molecules. They have a regulatory function, mainly in RNA silencing. Endogenous expression of microRNA’s (miRNA) can induce the degradation of their complementary messenger RNA, thereby altering overall gene-expression levels.
GenomeScan’s Small RNA-Seq service allows you to identify and quantify all small RNA types, including miRNA, siRNA, snoRNA, snRNA, mtRNA, piRNA and other non-coding sequences. Our R&D team has developed an accredited method, allowing you to select the size range of the transcripts you are interested in, with great accuracy and robustness. You can start with very little material: the total RNA input can be as low as 10 ng. With this minimal input, samples showed a concordance (R2) of 0.99 in our validation study. This opens many possibilities to analyze miRNA in liquid biopsies or tumor biopts.
In cancer research, miRNA’s are often the target of investigation. miRNA-deregulation can lead to all sorts of cancer types, where they are referred to as ‘oncomiRs’. They can also play a role in diagnosis of certain subtypes of cancers, prediction of the disease prognosis, and in stratifying patients. Even in the treatment of certain cancers, mRNA’s can be used as either a tool or a target for therapy.
In certain samples, several miRNA’s might be abundant, thereby masking the detection of other miRNA’s. Our scientists can design custom blocking oligo’s to remove these uninformative miRNAs from the library, so that less sequencing-space is needed.
