Improved conditions for isolation and quantification of RNA in urine specimens.

There is clear evidence that the occurrence of specific mRNAs in plasma and serum is associated with cancer, while the usefulness of other body fluids for nucleic acid-based cancer detection remains to be elucidated. Nevertheless, due to the principal advantages of urine (large sample quantities, easy to acquire), several attempts were made to use quantitative reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR)-based detection of putative RNA tumor markers from urine as a tool for noninvasive tumor detection. Because most of the commercially available RNA isolation systems do not accommodate larger sample volumes, the majority of experiments were performed using urine pellets.