TY - JOUR AU - Kim, Insook AU - Yang, Dongjin AU - Tang, Xinyu AU - Carroll, John L. PY - 2011 DA - 2011/10/24 TI - Reference gene validation for qPCR in rat carotid body during postnatal development JO - BMC Research Notes SP - 440 VL - 4 IS - 1 AB - The carotid bodies are the main arterial oxygen chemoreceptors in mammals. Afferent neural output from the carotid bodies to brainstem respiratory and cardiovascular nuclei provides tonic input and mediates important protective responses to acute and chronic hypoxia. It is widely accepted that the selection of reference genes for mRNA normalization in quantitative real-time PCR must be validated for a given tissue and set of conditions. This is particularly important for studies in carotid body during early postnatal maturation as the arterial oxygen tension undergoes major changes from fetal to postnatal life, which may affect reference gene expression. In order to determine the most stable and suitable reference genes for the study of rat carotid body during development, six commonly used reference genes, β-actin, RPII (RNA polymerase II), PPIA (peptidyl-proyl-isomerase A), TBP (TATA-box binding protein), GAPDH, and 18s rRNA, were evaluated in two age groups (P0-1 and P14-16) under three environmental oxygen conditions (normoxia, chronic hypoxia and chronic hyperoxia) using the three most commonly used software programs, geNorm, NormFinder and BestKeeper. SN - 1756-0500 UR - https://doi.org/10.1186/1756-0500-4-440 DO - 10.1186/1756-0500-4-440 ID - Kim2011 ER -