TRAC: A Novel Gene Expression Quantification Method - Compared to qPCR

TRAC (Transcript analysis by Affinity Capture) is a simple and fast gene expression analysis technique which gives similar results as qPCR but with higher accuracy. In the presented study we compared expression level measurements obtained from TRAC to the gold standard qPCR method (TaqMan). The TRAC and qPCR methods gave similar results. We observed a strong correlation (r²=0.92) between the results from TRAC and TaqMan. However, we also observed a marked differences in the coefficients of variation (CV) between the studies: For the TRAC measurements the CVs averaged at 8.6 %, while the average CV of TaqMan measurements was over 26 %. We explain this difference by the simplicity of the TRAC method, which eliminates many highly variable steps, such as mRNA extraction, cDNA conversion, and amplification, from the protocol.