Steady-state, ex vivo etc. - (Aug/10/2015 )

Hi,
I am looking for the proper term that would describe condition when I measure situation (expression of mRNA, production of proteins, etc.) e.g. in peripheral blood specimen or other tissue biopted (gained from biopsy). I think it is not "in vivo", but it is believed to mirror the real in vivo situation in the body. I used to use the therm "ex vivo" but I was told this is not correct, and another colleague adviced me to use the term "steady-state" which is hard to even translate and understand for me. Would anyone help me please?
Thanks,
Paja

Ex-vivo isn't the proper term as this is usually considered to be where you take a sample from an individual and then grow it (e.g. growing biopsy samples to create a cell line). Steady-state wouldn't apply either, as this would mean an unchanging condition. The term you are looking for isn't covered by the commonly used terms, so there might not be a short way of covering it without explanation.

However, the experiments you are performing on the samples are in-vitro experiments, which you could use if you said something like this: "In-vitro experiments were performed on samples taken from patient biopsies."

bob1 on Mon Aug 10 20:52:44 2015 said:

Ex-vivo isn't the proper term as this is usually considered to be where you take a sample from an individual and then grow it (e.g. growing biopsy samples to create a cell line). Steady-state wouldn't apply either, as this would mean an unchanging condition. The term you are looking for isn't covered by the commonly used terms, so there might not be a short way of covering it without explanation.

 

However, the experiments you are performing on the samples are in-vitro experiments, which you could use if you said something like this: "In-vitro experiments were performed on samples taken from patient biopsies."

Hi Bob,

Thank you very much for your reply. Nevertheless, I do not think the term in vitro suits my needs, because I do quantification of mRNA from blood cells directly gained from blood specimen, and simultaneously, part of the blood cell I do culture first and study effect of various stimulating factors - this one is in vitro for sure. I need to distinguish the measuring mRNA in blood cells immediately after blood collection/RNA isolation, from the RNA quantification after several days cultivation of those cells in Petri dish under some experimental condition...

In that case you could use "In vitro experiments were performed on samples taken from patient biopsies and on samples cultivated ex-vivo from the same biopsies."