Gene profiling studies in skeletal muscle by quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction assay

Gene profiling is an excellent tool to identify the genetic mechanisms, networks, and molecular pathways involved in skeletal muscle development and muscular disorders. Oligonucleotide or cDNA microarray can be the first step to identify the global gene expression in the study of interest. As microarray techniques provide a large set of differentially expressed genes in a given comparison, the expression profile can be narrowed down by taking various parameters into consideration such as fold values, p-values, and their relevance to the study. Every technique has its own limitations. Therefore, further validation of the results with a different technique is always necessary. Quantitative real-time reverse-transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) is the most common technique to validate microarray data and to study the relative expression of specific genes in any experimental set-up. Here, we describe, the qRT-PCR technique, in detail, for -successful gene expression studies in skeletal muscle cells and tissues.