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Separating brain, gland and muscle tissues pre-RNA extaction - (Oct/20/2011 )

Hi everyone,

I study the transcriptomic basis for honeybee eusociality, and need to look at RNA from brain tissue, RNA from gland tissue, and RNA from skeletal muscle. Does anyone have any good ideas about how to separate these three types of tissue? What I do currently is to perform painstaking and time-consuming dissections under a microscope and separate out these three tissue types. Is anyone aware of a differential centrifugation method where I could just grind up the whole bee and have the tissue types separated by density? Or a filtration method of some kind?

Thanks in advance for your help - you could potentially save me hours at the bench!

-plotophyte7-

I don;t think that would work at all, the tissues would be very similar in density, and you would have to prove that you have no contamination from other tissue types in each band.

-bob1-