Fig. 1

Schematic workflow used for reference gene identification. Expression of genes from four gene families were mined from five different microarray datasets (definitions of the datasets shown in Additional file 2: Table S1). Determination of each gene’s WRS is described in the Materials and Methods (Additional file 1). Ten candidate genes were selected based on their WRS and tested in qRT-PCR. The stabilities of the genes were then assessed using the ∆Ct approach. The most reliable reference genes were validated by the comparison of qRT-PCR and microarray data