I was told to look for house keeping genes like GAPDH or Beta Actin to quantify total target protein expression in tissues. I am just curious to know why such protein do not alter their expression in abnormal conditions like diseased state or radiation insult. Why do normal proteins alters in their expression?
Depending on the nature of your experiments and also tissue/organs that you use, you should be careful which housekeeping gene to choose for standardizing your data. The expression level of these genes may vary among tissues or cells. For example, it is known from the literature, as well from my experience that some commonly used housekeeping genes (tubulin, b -actin, glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase etc.) show sex-dependent expression. Nevertheless it is recommendable to use more than one housekeeping gene for quantification. Good luck and all the best :)
The right concept is that the expression of house keeping genes are closely related to the cell growth, but the expression of your target genes should be more related to your treatment rather than the cell growth. Any treatment can alter cell growth, as a consequence affect all the gene expressions. However If a gene is related to your treatment, the expression change of this gene must much big that that caused by the change of cell growth. This is the reason you need to chose a house keeping gene as a control in your analysis.
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