Fetal gut laser microdissection in combination with RNA preamplification enables epithelial-specific transcriptional profiling

Laser microdissection (LMD) technology enables highly specific gene expression analyses of biologically relevant questions at cell- or tissue-specific resolution. Nevertheless, specific cell types are often limited in quantity (i.e. fetal tissue), making high quality RNA extraction and subsequent gene expression approaches via common reverse transcriptase-quantitative PCR (RT-q-PCR) challenging. In the case of fetal gut epithelia representing immune modulatory interphases gene expression analysis with common RT-q-PCR is limited to a few genes (