actinomycin - (Feb/27/2019 )

My drug is increasing proliferation of gene of interest (GOI).  I would like to demonstrate the effect of this drug at the transcriptional level.  

Im planning to check if it delays mRNA degradation of my GOI. Has anyone used actinomycin D and correct if Im wrong in how to use it:

1. treat cells with actinomycin D for various time points

2. measure mRNA of GOI by qPCR

3. Also detect GOI by protein

4. To ensure actiomycin D is working, I check cyclin D1 mRNA levels after actiomycin D treatment?

Many thanks

also, how do we calculate the mRNA half life? for qPCR I would normalise the expression of GOI with actin or GAPDH internal control

That looks like it should work. You would calculate the half-life by plotting a decay curve, just as you would for any half-life calculation. 

Basically you would plot a normalized Ct value over time and calculate at which point 50% of the mRNA was left.