Ischemia-reperfusion injury may lead to alterations in the transcriptome of hepatic cells, which complicates molecular diagnostics and research. To find out more about this effect, Med Uni Graz researchers – with Kurt Zatloukal, ‘founder’ of BBMRI.at, as senior author – characterized the transcriptomes of non-malignant liver samples that were obtained at different time points of warm and cold ischemia and found several deregulated genes.

The authors conclude that the heterogeneity found between the samples from different patients is due to the different underlying diseases and variable stress responses of the samples during the pre-analytical phase. Furthermore, they name 230 potential reference genes for diagnostic applications that are very robust to pre-analytical changes and might serve as reference genes.

This study was supported by EU project SPIDIA (Standardization and Improvement of Generic Pre-analytical Tools and Procedures for In Vitro Diagnostics; www.spidia.eu, grant agreement number 222916).