Transfection of microRNA Mimics Should Be Used with Caution

Transfection of microRNA Mimics Should Be Used with Caution

Transient transfection of chemically synthesized microRNA (miRNA) mimics is being used extensively to study the functions and mechanisms of endogenous miRNAs. However, it remains unclear whether transfected miRNAs behave similarly to endogenous miRNAs. Here we show that transient transfection of miRNA mimics into HeLa cells by a commonly used method led to the accumulation of high molecular wei...

Liposome-mediated RNA transfection should be used with caution.

Liposome-mediated RNA transfection appears to present a number of advantages for studying the metabolism of reporter mRNAs in mammalian cells. This method is also widely used to transfect siRNAs. Here we describe results indicating that reporter mRNAs introduced into HeLa cells by liposomes do not present the expected behaviors. Namely, the stability of reporter mRNAs was independent of the pre...

receiver operating characteristic curve and odds ratio should be used with caution

Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve and Odds Ratio Should Be Used with Caution

We read with interest the article by Abu El Makarem MA et al. (1) entitled, “Platelet count/bipolar spleen diameter ratio for the prediction of esophageal varices: The special Egyptian situation.” This study evaluated noninvasive predictors of esophageal varices in cirrhotic patients by multivariate logistic regression and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis. However, in our ...

Why voxel-based morphometric analysis should be used with great caution when characterizing group differences.

A variety of voxel-based morphometric analysis methods have been adopted by the neuroimaging community in the recent years. In this commentary we describe why voxel-based statistics, which are commonly used to construct statistical parametric maps, are very limited in characterizing morphological differences between groups, and why the effectiveness of voxel-based statistics is significantly bi...