It is universally accepted that RNA purity and integrity are of foremost importance to ensure reliability and reproducibility of downstream applications. In the biomedical literature (PubMed, November 2004), from the 485 090 articles that relate to RNA, and the 287 515 or 40 395 including respectively the 'quality' or 'integrity' term, less than 100 were found to contain 'RNA quality' or 'RNA integrity' terms. Interestingly, half of them were published between 2001 and 2004; but none is proposing a standard operational procedure for RNA quality assessment to the scientific community. Except for two studies (24, 25) , those reports are based on 10 to 15 years old methods (1), indicating that they represent the established and currently mostly used methods. Our results strongly challenge the reliability and usefulness of those conventional methods, demonstrating their inconsistency to evaluate RNA quality.