We will do the same exercise as above in the commercial version of Genevestigator. The difference between the free and commercial version of RefGenes is the number of target genes you can select. In the free version you have to select one gene and then gradually add all other genes one at a time. The commercial version allows you to load as many target genes as you want simultaneously. As a consequence, you can select multiple probe sets for the same gene. All VIB scientists have free access to the commercial version of Genevestigator via their VIB email address. If you don’t know your VIB email address, check the Who’s Who of VIB.
join now
button. You will be redirected to a new window in which you will give some personal information including a valid VIB email address. Click Register
and check your email to activate your new account. Go back to the GeneVestigator websitepharma/biomediacal
or plant biology
by clicking the corresponding buttonStart
Open the RefGenes tool by clicking its icon in the Further tools
section and select the liver samples of the mouse 430_2 arrays as explained in the previous exercise.
Check the expression stability of the 4 commonly used reference genes
New
button in the Gene Selection
panel to create a new selection. The selection of samples defines which data are used for the analysis.OK
I still remove probe sets with an _s or _x since they do not specifically bind to one single gene: Finally you end up with an expandable list of the genes you asked for and you can tick or untick them to control the display of their expression data in the main window. By default all probe sets are ticked so you can see how stable the commonly used reference genes are expressed in the 651 mouse liver samples that are stored in Genevestigator: As you can see, the expression levels of the commonly used reference genes in the selected mouse liver samples is pretty variable which is also confirmed by their relatively high SD values.
The next step of selecting the 4 most stable candidate reference genes with medium expression levels is exactly the same as described above for the free version of RefGenes.
New
button at the top of the main window to create a new selection.Gene selection
panel and select Rename
Home
button at the top to go back to the tools overview page.Perturbations
tool in the Condition Search tools
sectionNew Sample selection
including all mouse 430_2 arrays. Untick all genes except for the first one and filter the long heatmap for at least 1.5 fold change differential expression:You now get a list of mouse samples in which the gene is not stably expressed so you can check if any of these samples is related to the samples in your study. Hover your mouse over the name of a sample to see more details about the sample. You can do this for each of the candidate reference genes and select the ones that best fit your needs
Exercise on selecting reference genes for metacaspases in Arabidopsis thaliana.
In a geNorm pilot experiment you analyze a set of candidate reference genes in a representative set of samples that you want to test in your final experiment. Based on the M-values and CVs that are calculated by qbase+, you can choose the genes that most satisfy the criteria for a good reference gene.