Hello everybody,

I have a question about the conservation of fish samples for a RNA extraction.

More precisely, I have some juveniles and I need to extract good quality RNA from head and gonads.

To doing that, currently I kill them and immerse in a solution of RNA Later to preserve RNA in all the tissues (the size of fishes is very small +/- 2 cm long so normally the RNA later can quickly enter into the fishes).

After conservation I dissect them (some days after) to have the gonads and heads.

Then I extract RNA with the RNEasy extraction kit (from Qiagen).

My problem is I have very bad results concerning the RNA integrity with the bioanalyzer (RIN scores very low from 3 to 5).

So my questions are :

Is an other way exist for preserving tissues from RNAse (but I need to keep the possibility of dissect them. For example fast freezing in liquid nitrogen is not possible in my case)?

Do you have some tips concerning RNA extraction for having beautiful RNAs?

Thanks you for your attention.

I'm totally lost and desperate :(

Renaud