Selection and Application of Reference Genes for Gene Expression Studies

Ho usekeeping genes are known a s such a class of genes that their expressions are existed in all tissues and cells of a given species, so they are widely used as reference genes to detect expression changes and patterns of the target genes in different tissues and organs of a species in a certain developmental stage or environmental stress conditions. However, these housekeeping genes can not be always stably expressed under all physiological conditions as ideal reference genes. During the transcription analysis of gene expression, the most common reference genes can not meet the requirements of accurate quantifi cation. The stably expressed reference genes can be screened according to some statistical analysis softwares, such as geNorm, BestKeeper and NormFinder. This paper reviewed the selection criteria, methods and applications of the reference genes for gene expression studies.