Generic sample from Caenorhabditis elegans
Caenorhabditis elegans
 (1) embryos were allowed to hatch out and arrest as L1s in S-Basal overnight; (2) the next morning, 10,000 L1s were plated onto 5 large, seeded plates each (50,000 worms total); (3) 3 days later, when worms were gravid adults, they were bleached again to obtain embryos; (4) the embryo sample was divided in half (obtained an average of about 400ul of packed embryos total, those were split up into two 200ul samples of embryos); (5) one ~200ul sample was treated immediately to 3 rounds of freeze/thaw in liquid nitrogen/37C water bath and submitted to RNA isolation protocols; this sample was the early embryo sample.  (6) the second ~200ul of embryos was placed into 50ml of S-Basal and incubated at 20C with shaking for about 4.5 hours. After the 4.5 hours, 10ul were checked under the Nomarski optics and the presence of mostly comma-stage embryos and only ~1 hatched L1 animal was confirmed. This sample was then treated to 3 rounds of freeze/thaw and submitted for RNA isolation; this sample is the late embryo sample.  Quality values are Illumina/Solexa quality values. 