The Genomics and Genotyping Core Facility at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics in Oxford has been testing the BD Smart Atlas Powerscript labelling kit to help improve its microarray service
The Genomics and Genotyping Core Facility at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics in Oxford has been testing the BD Smart Atlas Powerscript labelling kit to help improve its microarray service.
Head of the Genomics and Genotyping Facility, Dr Ioannis Ragoussis, explained: "We have had a long and good relationship with BD Biosciences and so naturally looked at its antibody microarrays to complement our expression profiling experiments." Dr Susannah Pedraza Diaz, who is responsible for microarrays, has evaluated the kit and explained: "We routinely extract tiny quantities of RNA from a number of different samples and needed a method that could fluorescently label these small amounts efficiently.
Some of the kits available require as much as 100 æg of RNA, although 10-20 æg is more usual.
The BD Smart Atlas Powerscript kit uses only 5 æg of RNA and has given us very good results so far.
BD Biosciences has produced a protocol for combining this labelling kit with the BD Smart cDNA Amplification kit, which means we may be able to go as low as 50 ng of RNA in the future.
This will be extremely useful as we anticipate receiving patient biopsy samples where the amount of RNA extracted is even more limited." Dr Ragoussis concluded: "In the long term, we would like to achieve more functional results from our microarrays and to unify expression profiling based on RNA and proteins to better understand the nature of gene defects."
