>For instance, if I submit 10 ug of total RNA from wild type and 2 ug of RNA from knockout, how are they normalized?
In this case, I think you might wanted to use 2 ug for both samples to make sure that the initial condition is as much the same as possible. However, if your samples are very small subpopulation from mouse, you might need to do regardless of the absolute amount.
As you would know, RNA seq data quality often depends on the quality (purity) of the RNA and also how much read you read. So, if you are comparing the low-read transcript, you might not get the real values. You might want to check the filter applied during the data processing.
If you are handling raw data , you should check the quality of each sample first. You could ask your collaborators (if you are not taking your data youseif) if the quality of your samples were good enough. Normalization is sometimes packaged together with the conversion into RPFKM and this process might worsen your results because your samples have large difference in the initial RNA amounts. For such large data, we usually normalized with the median values based on the fact that the most of the transcripts patterns (including house keeping genes) were not altered. You might want to check how all the data are processed to get the relative differences.
If you have replicate data, you can easily cross-check the result for correlation, the rank numbers of the transcripts and so on. If these data are not fairly correlated, it is possible that there are some technical errors during the data processing. |
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