Expression profiling of components of the miRNA maturation machinery.

The quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) is a valuable and well-proven technique used to investigate the expression level of multiple components of the microRNA (miRNA) maturation machinery. Here, we describe how to determine the messenger RNA expression levels of components of the miRNA machinery starting from the isolation of the RNA from a tissue biopsy to performance of the qRT-PCR.