Expression and significance of glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase in patients with osteosarcoma

Abstract

To observe the expression of glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase (GAPDH) in patients with osteosarcoma and its relationship with surgical stage, 60 patients with osteosarcoma, including 20 cases in Stage I, 17 cases in Stage II and 23 cases in Stage III were sequentially enrolled in this study. The expression of GAPDH in osteosarcoma and osteochondroma tissues on mRNA and protein levels were measured by fluorescent quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) and immunohistochemical stain, respectively. It was found that GAPDH was significantly up-regulated in osteosarcoma in comparison to the healthy control on mRNA and protein levels (P < 0. 05). The positive rate of GAPDH osteosarcomas in Stage III were significantly higher than those in Stages I and II (P < 0. 05). These data demonstrated that the expression of GAPDH correlates with the clinical stage of osteosarcomas, which implied that over-expressions of GAPDH play an important role in the development of osteosarcoma.

The continuing problem of poor transparency of reporting and use of inappropriate methods for RT-qPCR

“…In a certain percentage of papers the results are meaningless, because not only are single, unvalidated reference genes used to report expression profiles, but published evidence suggests that the reference genes themselves are regulated in the conditions under investigation. For example, GAPDH is widely used as a reference gene in osteosarcomas, yet it is apparently upregulated at both RNA and protein levels compared with healthy controls [5] .…”