mRNA In Situ Hybridization to In Vitro Cultured Cells

In basic and applied biomedical research there is a considerable interest in having reliable RNA in situ hybridization techniques, since these allow the detection of RNA expression in a morphological context at the individual cell level. Conventional molecular biology techniques for RNA analysis such as Northern hybridizations, RNase protection assays, and reverse transcription polymerase chain reactions (RT-PCR) demand the homogenization of the tissue or cell sample. In these cases the possibility of relating (changes in) RNA expression to histo-and cytomorphological information is lost to a very large extent.