A good overview of how microarrays work is given at the NIH website at
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/About/primer/microarrays.html
They are generally divided and differentiated by manyways
1. Type of of target DNA (immobilized nucleic acid molecule) used in the array fabrication.
- cDNA
- Oligonucleotide
- RNA
- Protein
- Antibody
- Tissue
2. Type of substrate to which the target DNA is printed or spotted
- glass
- membrane
- bead technology by illumina
3. Methodology used to present the target DNA on the substrate
- printed directly example affymterix, combimatrix
- spotted example OCichip, MWG,
4. Density Of probes on the array
- low density 100 s (example: protein anibodies)
- medium density 1000s to 10s of 1000s and more (example:cDNA )
- high density 100s to 1000s of 1000s 0(example” short oligonucloetide)
5. type of lebelling for hybridization
- single channel , using one colour
- double channel using two colour
there are many other different variat
ions b/w different brands now available in the market as the array technology is expanding
Some of the existing microarrays types are
Oligonucleotide Microarrays–spotted and direct print
CGH microarray
CHIP in chip microarrays
SNP microarray
cDNA microarray
Tissue microarrays
RNA microarrays
Protein Microarrays
Organic compund microarrays
Antibody microarrays
Tilling arrays
barcode microarrays
ROMA : Representational Oligonucleotide Microarray Analysis
What is the best system to purchase in our lab …is it affymetrix or agilent I dont know ..is these open or close system?
Safa that a very tough question, I guess its rather much tough er compared to my girlfriend’s occasional questions on her weight. the only respite is I can answer this one more confidantly and perhaps be still happy about it too. I am sorry for replying late,both are two different technologies and its difficult to choose one over other both have problems,and advantages. its like comparing a four wheel drive against a two wheel drive . So I have to write another post as an answer to this. The bottom line is dont let technology drive your discovery and research interest let be the other way. I will write about this as the next post
Hi Safa,
check http://www.geniom.com. That’s a nice flexible in-situ microarray synthesizer and includes a sophisticated hyb station plus reader. 8 microarrays are synthesized simultaneously in microchannels, which hold up to 10000 individual features. “Dynamic detection” allows you to make multiple pics at different temperature levels so you can create melting curves for each feature, which helps significantly during SNP detection.
A proprietery synthesis scheme from 5′ to 3′ allows you to do “On-Chip-Biology” including PCR.
And there are many more applications coming!
Check it out and let us know what you think!
Best
Stefan
I am a radiologist, well connected in teleradiology/telemedicine. I am interested in developing imaging in drug trials/imaging core lab business.Feel free to contact me by email or at 516-547-5815.
Do you have any recommended suppliers of custom spotted oligo arrays?
I’m working as bioinformatics project coordinator in hyderabad at india. Now we are planing to purchase microarray so we need complete procedure for buying that machine and where is the service provider. ?
BIOBASE ExPlain System for Biomarker Discovery:
To add value to BIOBASE biological databases, we have sophisticated analysis tool called ExPlain. It provides a novel, fully integrated analysis and biological interpretation for High throughput data like microarray, proteomic, ChiP-chip, PCR.
The tool helps in understanding the effect of the differentially expressed product by mapping onto the pathways and further classifying the information into diseases & Gene ontology level, but what makes it novel is to understand the cause for the differential expression. To determine the cause (may be a biomarker or therapeutic target), we use promoter analysis which helps in predicting the transcriptional factors binding site and further building up the network till we can find the key node that triggers the transcriptional factors. The key node can be mapped onto the proteome database for better understanding of the disease associations and accelerate the hypothetically driven biomarker research.
we provide many products and services. We are unique in that our single platform can be used for DNA, protein and carbohydate microarrays. Is is very easy to spot your own microarrays using our equipment, but higher density microarrays can be made by in-situ synthesis. That said, there are many types of biomoecules that are put into a microarray format that cannot be produced in-situ.