Microarray Technology

The Expression Genomics laboratory has overseen microarray technology at the IMB since its inception of the array facility in 2001. Over the last 5 years, the expression genomics lab has pioneered expression profiling using all major array platforms including in house spotted arrays and commercial arrays from Affymetrix, Agilent, Combimatrix and Illumina. More recently custom arrays have been designed to study alternative splicing using exon-specific and exon junction probes.

The laboratory has the entire necessary infrastructure for preparing probe libraries and robotic printing of up to 30,000 elements per array. The expression Genomics laboratory also possesses a clone bank of more than 200,000 individual mouse and human cDNAs and BACs which are used as probes for microarrays as well as high-throughput functional screening of gene function.

In 2006 the SRC Microarray facility, in conjunction with the Expression Genomics laboratory, SRC Computational Chemistry and Biology unit, and Prof Matt Brown's laboratory, CICR, established a service to process and analyse gene expression via Illumina bead arrays, based on the standard 24- 48K human and mouse chips. This service is available to the Australasian research community.