Addition of β-mercaptoethanol is a prerequisite for high-quality RNA isolation using QIAsymphony technology as demonstrated by detection of molecular aberrations in hematologic malignancies.

The isolation of high-quality RNA and DNA from various specimens is essential to perform reliable molecular diagnostic assays. In routine diagnostics of hematologic malignancies isolation of high-quality RNA is a prerequisite. We used QIAsymphony technology (QST) using a customized RNA CT 800 V6 protocol for automated semi-high-throughput isolation of RNA from human specimens and compared the results for breakpoint cluster region-c-abl oncogene 1 (BCR-ABL1) quantification by real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RQ-PCR) and detection of JAK2 V617F mutations by reverse-transcriptase PCR (RT-PCR) on QST RNA with RNA isolation performed with our routine manual method using RNA-Bee (RB).