Andreas Schroeder is the first-listed author of the 2006 primary study introducing the RNA integrity number. The paper credits him with study design, methodology, experiments, validation, software implementation and manuscript preparation. These documented roles identify his contribution without inferring a later appointment or conflating him with namesakes.[ref]
The RIN: an RNA integrity number for assigning integrity values to RNA measurements by Andreas Schroeder and others. Author byline and Authors’ contributions, initials AS
The scientific problem was to make RNA integrity assessment more reproducible. An electropherogram contains a distribution of RNA fragments rather than a direct yes-or-no intactness reading. The team's approach combined trace features into a learned score; Schroeder contributed to both the experimental work and its software implementation.[ref]
The distinction between total RNA and intact RNA explains the motivation. Suppose one preparation contains ten strands of 1000 nucleotides each. Cleaving every strand once into two 500-nucleotide pieces doubles the number of strands from ten to twenty but leaves the total at 10,000 nucleotides. An analysis requiring an uninterrupted 1000-nucleotide template now fails, even though no nucleotide material has been removed. A distribution-sensitive measurement can expose this change in a way that total amount alone cannot.
A trained integrity score is consequently a measurement model: its features, training labels and validation data determine what its numerical scale supports. The RNA integrity number article describes the original apparatus and gives examples distinguishing score, signal amount and prediction error.
Articles by others on the same topic
There are currently no matching articles.