Transfected Cell Microarrays

Microarrays are slides "printed" with thousands of small spots of biological material, in a mechanism similar to inkjet printing, which allow rapid assaying of many cell phenotypes under different conditions. Traditional DNA-based microarrays are printed with DNA oligonucleotides complimentary to the template strand of the full compliment or a subset of genes from a given organism, which are then UV-crosslinked to the slides. mRNA is isolated from the organism in question under two different conditions (…

…vectors or RNAi knockout vectors. As anybody who has tried to put plasmids together knows, this is a very-time consuming approach, especially for the full complement of ~35000 human genes. However, different organizations are trying to put together libraries of cDNA/RNAi vectors for the full complement of human and mouse genes. Additionally, the cell lines that can be used for transfection are limited at present to those that can take up the expression vectors efficiently.