The design of a gene chip for functional immunological studies on a high-quality control platform.
We have created an immunology-related microarray chip containing primarily known genes with well-studied functional properties. By looking at known genes rather than expressed sequence tags, we hope to gain a better understanding of immunological pathways and how they work. The immunology gene chip contains genes from the following functional categories: T cell genes; B cell genes; dendritic cell genes; chemokine and cytokine genes; apoptosis genes; cell cycle genes; cell interaction genes; general hematology and immunology genes; and adhesion genes. We have also developed a novel three-color cDNA array platform in which arrays are directly visualized before hybridization, which allows us to select only high-quality chips for our experiments. In an effort to provide quantitative quality control for each array element as well as the entire chip, we have developed Matarray, a software package for image processing and data acquisition. With Matarray, we have built a quantitative data filtering and normalization scheme that has proved to be more efficient than the existing methods. The list of immunology chip genes is available from the authors.
Waukau
Jill
J
Max McGee National Research Center for Juvenile Diabetes, Department of Pediatrics, Medical College and Children's Hospital of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53226, USA.
Jailwala
Parthav
P
Wang
Youmin
Y
Khoo
Huoy-Jii
HJ
Ghosh
Soumitra
S
Wang
Xujing
X
Hessner
Martin J
MJ
D018925:Chemokines / Q000235:genetics; D016207:Cytokines / Q000235:genetics; D020411:Oligonucleotide Array Sequence Analysis; D011786:Quality Control
D018925:Chemokines; D016207:Cytokines