The Impact of Biosampling Procedures on Molecular Data Interpretation

The separation between biological and technical variation without extensive use of technical replicates is often challenging, particularly in the context of different forms of protein and peptide modifications. Biosampling procedures in the research laboratory are easier to conduct within a shorter time frame and under controlled conditions as compared with clinical sampling, with the latter often having issues of reproducibility. But is the research laboratory biosampling really less variable? Biosampling introduces within minutes rapid tissue-specific changes in the cellular microenvironment, thus inducing a range of different pathways associated with cell survival. Biosampling involves hypoxia and, depending on the circumstances, hypothermia, circumstances for which there are evolutionarily conserved defense strategies in the range of species and also are relevant for the range of biomedical conditions. It remains unclear to what extent such adaptive processes are reflected in different biosampling procedures or how important they are for the definition of sample quality. Lately, an increasing number of comparative studies on different biosampling approaches, postmortem effects and pre-sampling biological state, have investigated such immediate early biosampling effects. Commonalities between biosampling effects and a range of ischemia/reperfusion- and hypometabolism/anoxia-associated biological phenomena indicate that even small variations in post-sampling time intervals are likely to introduce a set of nonrandom and tissue-specific effects of experimental importance (both in vivo and in vitro). This review integrates the information provided by these comparative studies and discusses how an adaptive biological perspective in biosampling procedures may be relevant for sample quality issues.