1. Introduction
In recent years, miRNA profiling for the identification of human
body fluids and tissues has strongly inspired the field of forensic
molecular biology [1–3]. The so-called miRNome,the entirety of all
miRNAs expressed at a given time point and under certain
conditions, represents a unique cell signature which thereby
enables the determination of its biological origin. Utilizing qPCR
technology, which is characterized by high sensitivity and
specificity, miRNA expression patterns can easily be evaluated.
Nevertheless, to achieve accurate and reproducible data, nonbiological
variances in between examined sample sets and runs
need to be corrected by using suitable and verified references
which fit the experimental requirements for a specific setup. In the
present study, we therefore determined the stability of 10 candidate
references in a set of forensically relevant body fluids and skin
cells by using the global mean normalization algorithm geNorm
[4]. Identified genes were applied as normalizers for the analysis of
cell type-specific target gene expression levels. Furthermore, the
same data set was corrected independently with U6B, and the
results of both approaches were compared to assess the impact of
the chosen normalizers on the relative quantity of miRNA targets.