High quality RNA was extracted from the majority of the biospecimens collected for the GTEx project. Fig. 5 shows the average RIN values5 derived by the LDACC, on a per tissue basis for tissues collected from the first 190 GTEx cases (see Supplementary Text S1 for the percentages of individual tissue types that have RIN values greater than 6; Supplementary material is available online at www.liebertpub.com/bio). Eleven tissue types had at least 70% of the samples with RIN greater than 6, and more than 60% of all RNA from GTEx tissues had RIN values greater than 6, making them suitable for high dimensional genomic analyses. A RIN value of 6 was set as a goal because, in general, tissues with a RIN of 6 and above yield high quality RNA sequencing data, whereas tissues with a RIN value below 6 are more likely to have samples with failed sequencing reactions.8 At the outset of the project, we also tested RNAs of different quality (RIN 2.0–9.0) across multiple different library construction protocols for RNA sequencing. The most scalable and robust library
