For all these reasons, the development of a reliable, fully integrated and automated system appropriate for numeric evaluation of RNA integrity is highly desirable. Standardized RNA quality assessment would allow a more reliable comparison of experiments and facilitate exchange of biological information within the scientific community. With that prospect in mind, and with the aim of anticipating future standards by pre-normative research, we identified and tested two software packages recently developed to gauge the integrity of RNA samples with a user-independent strategy: one open source, the degradometer software for calculation of the degradation factor and 'true' 28S:18S ratio based on peak heights (24) and the freely available RIN algorithm of the Agilent 2100 expert software, based on computation of a 'RNA Integrity Number' (RIN) (25) . Both tools were developed separately to extract information about RNA integrity from microcapillary electrophoretic traces and produce a userindependent metrics. Using these tools, we assessed the purity and integrity of 414 RNA samples, derived from 14 different human adult tissues and cell lines, many of which representing tumors. Those results were compared with conventional RNA quality measurement approaches as well as with highly expert human interpretation. We evaluated the simplicity for users and examined the potential, accuracy and efficiency of each method to contribute to standardization of RNA integrity assessment upstream of biological assays. These procedures were further validated by real-time RT-PCR quantitation of the expression levels of three housekeeping genes, using the same RNA samples, at different levels of degradation.