I have a difficulty to understand outcome of following experiment.

Experiment outline

Mouse

  • Wild type (control)
  • Heterozygous mouse (conventional knock-out (Gene+/-))

Sample

RNA from

  • Total bone marrow

or

  • FACS sorted LSK population

Assay

  • Real-time PCR (normalized to GAPDH)

Result

Samples from Gene +/- mouse showed

  • About 20% reduction in total bone marrow
  • About 50% reduction in LSK population

compared to samples from wildtype mice.

Question

  • Why checking mRNA expression in total bone marrow does not have 50% reduction of mRNA?
  • Shouldn't heterozygous mice (conventional knockout) suppose to have the 50% mRNA expression in all tissue?

I thought conventional heterozygous mice should have 50% expression of mRNA compared to control mice regardless of tissues or hematopoietic progenitors.

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