Habilitation Livestock Transcriptomics: Quantitative mRNA Analytics in Molecular Endocrinology and Physiology

Molecular technologies are currently evolving rapidly 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 genomics, transcriptomics and 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 methodologies is the quantitative assessment of target nucleic acids, mostly performed as quantitative polymerase chain reaction (PCR) on DNA level or combined with reverse transcription PCR (RT-PCR) to investigate the transcriptome on RNA level. This review will introduce the state of the art in quantitative RT-PCR using real-time RT-PCR on the field of livestock molecular endocrinology and physiology.