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Andria K Watson, Kenneth W Witwer, Do Platform-Specific Factors Explain MicroRNA Profiling Disparities?, Clinical Chemistry, Volume 58, Issue 2, 1 February 2012, Pages 472–474, https://doi.org/10.1373/clinchem.2011.175281
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To the Editor:
Because of the paucity of information on microRNA (miRNA)1 populations in many body fluids, we read with great interest the report by Weber et al. on the miRNA profiles of 12 body fluids (1). This important work suggests that fluids—some obtained noninvasively—are rich sources of miRNA biomarkers. Using quantitative PCR (Qiagen), the authors determined that all of the fluids examined have a complement of several hundred miRNAs, from approximately 200 in urine to >450 in saliva. Some miRNAs, they found, are specific to a single fluid, whereas others, such as miR-335*, miR-377*, miR-518e, and miR-616*, are among those with the highest abundance, as estimated by the threshold cycle of amplification (Cq), and occur in multiple types of fluids.
We recently reported that a change in the production of 6 plasma miRNAs predicts the development of lentivirus-associated central nervous system disease (2), and we compared the plasma findings of Weber et al. with data from our ongoing work. Like Weber et al., we used quantitative PCR (Life Technologies) and global normalization. We were surprised to detect only a third of the miRNAs listed by Weber et al. as the 100 most abundant. Some were not detected in all pools. None of the top 100 miRNAs of Weber et al. was among our 20 earliest-amplifying targets. Conversely, more than half of the 100 miRNAs that had the highest abundance in our study were not detected by Weber et al.
