RESUMEN
The use of reference genes is the most common method of controlling the variation in mRNA expression during quantitative polymerase chain reaction, although the use of traditional reference genes, such as ßactin, glyceraldehyde3phosphate dehydrogenase or 18S ribosomal RNA, without validation occasionally leads to unreliable results. Therefore, the present study aimed to evaluate a set of five commonly used reference genes to determine the most suitable for gene expression studies in normal ovarian tissues, borderline ovarian and ovarian cancer tissues. The expression stabilities of these genes were ranked using two gene stability algorithms, geNorm and NormFinder. Using geNorm, the two best reference genes in ovarian cancer were ßglucuronidase and ßactin. Hypoxanthine phosphoribosyltransferase1 and ßglucuronidase were the most stable in ovarian borderline tumours, and hypoxanthine phosphoribosyltransferase1 and glyceraldehyde3phosphate dehydrogenase were the most stable in normal ovarian tissues. NormFinder ranked ßactin the most stable in ovarian cancer, and the best combination of two genes was ßglucuronidase and ßactin. In borderline tumours, hypoxanthine phosphoribosyltransferase1 was identified as the most stable, and the best combination was hypoxanthine phosphoribosyltransferase1 and ßglucuronidase. In normal ovarian tissues, ßglucuronidase was recommended as the optimum reference gene, and the most optimum pair of reference genes was hypoxanthine phosphoribosyltransferase1 and ßactin. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to investigate the selection of a set of reference genes for normalisation in quantitative polymerase chain reactions in different ovarian tissues, and therefore it is recommended that ßglucuronidase, ßactin and hypoxanthine phosphoribosyltransferase1 are the most suitable reference genes for such analyses.