Grace had previously pooled a set of crab RNA in preparation for RNAseq. Yesterday, we/she concentrated the samples and then quantified them. Unfortunately, Qubit results were not good (concentrations were far below the expected 20ng/uL) and the NanoDrop1000 results yielded awful looking curves.

In an attempt to figure out what was wrong, I decided to use the RNeasy Plus Mini Kit (Qiagen) on the three pools. I did this due to the poor spec curves seen in the NanoDrop1000 measurements. Additionally, all of the RNA pools had undissolved/insoluble bits floating around in them. My thinking was that excess contaminants/salts could be interfering with the Qubit assay. Removing these could/should enlighten us as to what the issue might be.

Followed the manufacturer’s protocol for RNeasy MiniElute Cleanup Kit (as the RNeasy Plus Mini Kit uses the same reagents/columns for RNA purification) for samples with <100uL.

Samples were quantified on the RobertsLab NanoDrop1000 (ThermoFisher) and the Qubit 3.0 (ThermoFisher) using the RNA high sensitivity (HS) Kit. Used 1uL of each sample.

Results:

Qubit (Google Sheet): 20180719_qubit_RNA_crab_pools

NanoDrop:

The NanoDrop did not detect any RNA in the samples.

The Qubit did not detect any RNA in Crab Pool 1. The other two samples had similar concentrations (~7ng/uL). This would mean a total of ~84ng of RNA was present in each of those two samples.

All pools were expected to have well over 1000ng of RNA.

Will have to think about what should be done, but I would lean towards attempting to run some “test” samples through the RNeasy Cleanup kit to see if that would help get us more accurate Qubit readings? I don’t know, though…