The project began as a 2.5-year pilot study to assess the feasibility of collecting tissue from up to 40 different tissue types from women and 34 different tissue types from men, from hundreds of individual donors.1,4 The resulting biospecimens needed to yield RNA with an RNA Integrity Number (RIN)5 of at least 6 for optimal RNA sequencing results. The National Cancer Institute (NCI)'s Biorepositories and Biospecimen Research Branch (BBRB) worked with the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), and other GTEx project partners to develop a plan for collecting the normal human biospecimens for GTEx.
