Towards a Standardised Method to Acquire and Store Liver Samples and Guidelines to Improve Quality Control and Exchange of Relative Expression Data

The current ‘state-of-the-art’ molecular techniques are extremely sensitive and consequently prone to false results. Even more so than in the past, today’s hepatology research depends on high quality samples, especially for the molecular analyses. In all steps, starting with specimen sampling, fixation, storage, molecular processing and finally data calculation, variations in procedures between research laboratories may have a profound effect on the final conclusions. At the end of the day, this is an enormous drawback once data from different research institutes need to be reproduced, compared and/or combined. To improve standardisation, the so-called MIQE guidelines (Minimum Information for Publication of Quantitative RealTime PCR Experiments) were presented for quantitative PCR (qPCR) studies. 1,2 Furthermore, around the