The phrase "a reference mRNA against" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used in scientific contexts, particularly in molecular biology or genetics, to describe a specific mRNA that serves as a standard or comparison for other mRNA sequences.
Example: "In our experiment, we used a reference mRNA against which we measured the expression levels of target genes."
Alternatives: "a standard mRNA for" or "a control mRNA to".
For accurate reporting the selection of an optimal reference mRNA against which the test mRNA(s) can be normalised is essential (Beillard et al, 2003; Viprey et al, 2007).
Transcripts without a reference mRNA were discarded from our analysis.
It is now accepted that normalisation against a single reference mRNA is likely to be inappropriate (Tricarico et al, 2002; Andersen et al, 2004), except in very well-defined circumstances (Dheda et al, 2004), but normalisation against a panel of reference genes, containing at least the three less variable, should be preferred (Vandesompele et al, 2002).
We also found that 16.6% of the reported proteome lacked a corresponding reference mRNA.
Sequence subtractions were performed using megablast [ 17] against a collection of reference mRNA sequences from A. thaliana (TAIR8_cdna, downloaded from The Arabidopsis Information Resource ftp site: with word size 20, no filter for low complexity regions and a high expect (e) value (1000).
We identified the reference mRNA (an mRNA that aligns with 100% coverage and identity to an annotated protein) of each human, mouse, rat and cow transcripts.
The predicted gene sequences were aligned against NCBI reference mRNA sequences using BLAST programs [41] to identify the boundaries of exons (i.e., to prevent contamination of coding regions by introns) and to distinguish expressed genes from pseudogenes.
To identify candidate SNVs in nDNA-encoded genes that differentiate the chameleons according to their mtDNA types (i.e., north and south to the Jezreel Valley), we mapped all the RNA-seq samples against the reference mRNA transcriptome.
The relative expression of target mRNA levels were calculated as a ratio relative to the beta-actin reference mRNA [33].
GAPDH was amplified as the reference mRNA.
