Investigating the impact of RNA integrity variation on the transcriptome of human leukemic cells

High RNA integrity is essential for good quality of transcriptomics profiling. Nevertheless, in some cases samples with low RNA integrity is the only available material to study. This work was set to investigate the impact of thermal-induced RNA degradation on the transcriptomic profiles of human leukemic cells. DNA microarray-based transcriptomics was conducted on two groups of samples; high RNA integrity samples (n = 4) and low RNA integrity samples (n = 5). RNA degradation caused limited but noticeable changes in the transcriptomes. Only 1945 (6.7%) of 29,230 genes showed altered quantitation (fold change ≥ two-fold, p value ≤ 0.03, corrected p value ≤ 0.05). RNA degradation had the most impact on short transcripts and those with short distance between their 5’end and the probe binding position. Overall, the present work identified the genes whose relative quantification is sensitive to RNA degradation. Therefore, altered expression of these genes should be interpreted with caution when studied in low integrity RNA samples. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s13205-022-03223-1.