Selection of Reliable Reference Genes for Analysis of Gene Expression in Spinal Cord during Rat Postnatal Development and after Injury.

In order to obtain unbiased results of target gene expression, selection of the most appropriate reference gene (RG) remains a key precondition. However, an experimental study focused on the validation of stably expressed RGs in the rat spinal cord (SC) during development or after spinal cord injury (SCI) is missing. In our study, we tested the stability of the expression of nine selected RGs in rat SC tissue during normal development (postnatal days 1-43, adulthood) and after minimal (mSCI) and contusion (cSCI) spinal cord injury.