The Anatomy of a Microarray Experiment

It is not as complicated as you think as long as you stick on the recipe.

1. Apply POI (Perturbation Of Interest) to your cells.

This could be a drug treatment, hyper- or hypo- oxia treatment or simply disease cells.

2. Get your normal control, untreated cells ready.

Now we are going to take molecular genetics pictures of your cells.

3. Spin down your cells.

4. Isolate RNA.

5. Get the cDNA copy of the RNA.

The cDNA copy of your cells represents the most recent status of cells of interest. Ready to take the picture.

6. Hybridize on microarray chips and wash off the excess cDNA.

7. Scan the image on green and red filters.

8. Digitally recombine the picture and analyze the image.

The genetic picture of the image obtained tells you which genes are differentially expressed in between the untreated and treated batch of cells.

Animation:
http://www.bio.davidson.edu/Co...