Impact of blood collection and processing on peripheral blood gene expression profiling in type 1 diabetes

Background The natural history of type 1 diabetes (T1D) is challenging to investigate, especially as pre-diabetic individuals are difficult to identify. Numerous T1D consortia have been established to collect whole blood for gene expression analysis from individuals with or at risk to develop T1D. However, with no universally accepted protocol for their collection, differences in sample processing may lead to variances in the results. Here, we examined whether the choice of blood collection tube and RNA extraction kit leads to differences in the expression of genes that are changed during the progression of T1D, and if these differences could be minimized by measuring gene expression directly from the lysate of whole blood. Results Microarray analysis showed that the expression of 901 genes is highly influenced by sample processing using the PAXgene versus the Tempus system. These included a significant number of lymphocyte-specific genes and genes whose expression has been reported to differ in the peripheral blood of at-risk and T1D patients compared to controls. We showed that artificial changes in gene expression occur when control and T1D samples were processed differently. The sample processing-dependent differences in gene expression were largely due to loss of transcripts during the RNA extraction step using the PAXgene system. The majority of differences were not observed when gene expression was measured in whole blood lysates prepared from blood collected in PAXgene and Tempus tubes. Conclusion We showed that the gene expression profile of samples processed using the Tempus system is more accurate than that of samples processed using the PAXgene system. Variation in sample processing can result in misleading changes in gene expression. However, these differences can be minimized by measuring gene expression directly in whole blood lysates.