Patent ID: 8346486

Claim:
A method for determining the extent of degradation, expressed in terms of a quality value, of an RNA sample, the method comprising: separating the RNA sample by mobility, using an electrophoresis device, to generate an electropherogram, extracting a number of prescribed features from the electropherogram using data analysis, and determining the quality value, which indicates the extent of degradation of the RNA sample, from the extracted features using a quality algorithm, wherein the quality algorithm has been derived from: collecting a statistically significant number of trial electropherograms covering a prescribed set of RNA samples, assigning a quality label, which indicates the extent that the trial electropherogram exhibits signs of degradation, to every trial electropherogram, extracting features from the trial electropherograms using data analysis, determining functional interrelations among the quality labels and one or more combinations of the extracted features, assigning a rating factor to every functional interrelation, and specifying the functional interrelation that has the highest rating factor as the quality algorithm.