A Home-brew Real-time PCR Assay for Reliable Detection and Quantification of Mature miR-122

miR-122 is a liver-specific miRNA that has significant gene expression alterations in response to specific pathophysiological circumstances of liver such as drug-induced liver injury, hepatocellular carcinoma, and hepatitis B and C virus infections. Therefore, accurate and precise quantification of miR-122 is very important for clinical diagnostics. However, because of the lack of in vitro diagnostics assays for miR-122 detection and quantification of the existence of an open-source assay could inevitably provide external evaluation by other researchers and the chance of promoting the assay when required. The aim of this study was to develop a Taqman real-time polymerase chain reaction assay, which is capable of robust and reliable quantification of miR-122 in different sample types. We used stem loop methodology to design a specific Taqman real-time polymerase chain reaction assay for miR-122. This technique enabled us to reliably and reproducibly quantify short-length oligonucleotides such as miR-122. The specificity, sensitivity, interassay and intra-assay, and the dynamic range of the assay were experimentally determined by their respective methodology. The assay had a linear dynamic range of 3E(6) to 4.8E(3) miR-122 copies/reaction and the limit of detection was determined to be between 960 and 192 copies/reaction with 95% confidence interval. The assay gave a coefficient of variation for the C-t values of <1.4% and 0.78% for intra-assay and interassay, respectively. Taking into account that miR-122 is expressed in >50,000 copies per hepatocyte, this assay is able to suffice the need for reliable detection and quantification of this miRNA. Therefore, this study can be considered as a start point for standardizing miR-122 quantification.