Quantification of candidate gene mRNA expression in food producing animals using qRT-PCR*

Molecular technologies are currently evolving rapidly and gain more and more importance in agricultural and veterinary sciences. This results in an immense progress in the accumulation of new data potentially useful for molecular diagnostics in farm animal physiology, immunology, diseases and new breeding strategies. While we are still at the “very beginning” of understanding the ”-omics”, e.g. genomics, transcriptomics or proteomics in relation to animal physiology, this development has dramatically changed our perspectives in research during the last decade. It can be foreseen, that the application of sophisticated rather than simple methods will be necessary for numerous diagnostic questions. One of this highly sophisticated methods is the quantitative assessment of target nucleic acids, mostly performed as quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) on DNA level or combined with reverse transcription PCR (RT-PCR) to investigate the transcriptome on mRNA level. The gene expression profiling approach combines the mRNA screening from many different genes in various cell types. This review will introduce the state of the art in mRNA expression profiling by quantitative RT-PCR (qRT-PCR) in the field of livestock molecular physiology.

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