For financial issues, a team member has suggested to estimate the expression levels of different samples from the same group as a one sample. In other words, adding the RNA of all samples from the same group to each other and consider them as a one sample. Kindly, is it an acceptable approach or do you think it will affect the results validity. Thanks in advance.
Well, if all you are wanting is a quick check to see if your pooled group has different expression than your control group you certainly can pool samples but that group may end up quite similar to your control (it just depends on the range of expression and how many samples are similar to controls or not). You can also pre-screen your individuals with "semi-quantitative" end-point PCR to identify ones of particular interest for the QPCR.
I guess an important question here is what are you trying to discover? Are you screening for good events? Trying to find out if the gene suppression worked?
Are you screening for something rare? If yes, then creating pools of samples could make the process go faster. Or as Jochen Wilhelm
says, you can skip the technical replicates for a first look.Also, this will only work if what you are looking for is a large *increase* in cDNA/target molecule abundance (e.g. presence of COVID-19 viral RNA only in infected individuals). This will not work if you are hoping to find a decrease in expression since it will be masked by the abundance of the molecule in the other samples.
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