I have never isolated RNA from blood, let alone serum and I really don't know which is the best strategi. Also I don't know which kit to use. For now, I found 2 Qiagen kits: miRNeasy Serum/Plasma Advanced Kit and QIAamp RNA Blood Mini Kit and I don't know which one is more suitable. After isolation, I'll perform RT-PCR. What is your experience?
What are you looking for?
If you use whole blood, you'll actually get meaningful amounts of mRNA, because blood contains transcriptionally-active cells.
if you use serum, you kinda won't, because serum is a cell free fluid. You'll maybe have trace mRNAs released from damaged cells, but these will be few in number and thus low in abundance.
Serum will, however, be rich in miRs, both released from damaged cells and as constitutive components of the circulatory milieu.
If you are interested in serum microRNAs, serum is fine. If you're interested in mRNAs in microvesicles/exosomes, then serum is also probably fine, but if you're interested in anything else, then I'd say: use blood.
Thank your for your answer, John Hildyard ! I want to study the expression levels of proteins in the blood, so I'll actually need whole blood. I was confused for a while, that the serum contains also the white blood cells, which is totally wrong... Do you have any experience with a kit for RNA isolation from blood?
With blood, a lot of the time it comes down to deciding what it is you want.
Whole blood will get you everything, but with the proviso that the vast majority of that "everything" will be erythrocytes, and thus almost all the protein will be serum albumin and various flavours of globin, and the transcriptional milieu will be a bit limited (erythrocytes don't transcribe anything, after all).
Serum gets you cell-free stuff, so will be useful for serum miRs and anything non-cellular, though again the protein here will be mostly albumin.
White cells only (PBMCs/buffy coat) gets you the most transcriptionally active, interesting cell population, but can be tricky to isolate and also will greatly reduce the amount of material you collect, but here you'll be focussing only on the stuff that isn't red blood cells or serum/plasma.
Usually people tend to go for either serum or mononuclear cells, because erythrocytes are rarely the target of interest, and this allows that otherwise majority component to be excluded.
Henry Kolge I have used Trizol to isolate RNA from bacteria and I was wondering if I can use it for blood, too, but I figured out that I should go with a kit.
Well I have tried it in my lab and it worked.,
A kit would perhaps be more efficient
@Elena Krachmarova for mRNA isolation from blood you can use Thermofischer's Purelink RNA mini kit.
I've used this kit. The concentration and quality of mRNA is also good.
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