Quantitation of Long Noncoding RNA Using Digital PCR.

Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) are implicated in many physiological or disease processes and alterations in their expression may contribute to the development of various diseases. Accurate quantitation of lncRNA can be useful in measuring changes in expression in different settings such as in the circulation where the measurement of lncRNA may be useful as a biomarker of disease. However, the low levels of lncRNA expression require the use of highly sensitive detection technologies for accurate quantitation. Digital polymerase chain reaction (dPCR) is a sensitive method for absolute quantification of lncRNA and can be useful for measurement of gene expression when transcript levels are low. By providing a direct measurement without normalization, the use of dPCR may provide advantages for quantitation of low-abundance targets.