Instrumentation

The Microarray Core is well equipped for detailed studies on gene expression as well as related services including RNA isolation and quality control; hybridizations to Affymetrix GeneChip and in house spotted cDNA arrays. Major instrumentation at our core facility include the following:

Agilent BioAnalyzer

A small amount of sample is loaded into the wells in a chip which is then loaded into the Bioanalyzer.
Electrodes applied to the chip cause the RNA to move through microchannels filled with a sieving polymer and fluorescent dye.
Fluorescence signal is plotted against run-time to generate an electropherogram or translated to gel-like images.
Quality metrics such as 28S/18S ratio and RIN (RNA integrity number) are generated also.

Affymetrix GeneChip Fluidics station 400

The fluidics stations automate the washing and staining aspects of the sample processing stream

Affymetrix GeneChip Scanner

An excitation laser is passed over the surface of themicroarray at a very high resolution.
Emmissions are scanned at multiple wavelengths from a single excitation wavelength.
Autoloader allows temperature controlled handling of up to 48 GeneChips per run.

Axon Genepix Scanner

An excitation laser is passed over the surface of themicroarray at a very high resolution.
Emmissions are scanned at multiple wavelengths from a single excitation wavelength.
Used for scanning spotted arrays on glass slides, one at a time.

GMS Microarrayer

A robotic system used for creating custom spotted arrays.

GSI Lumonics 3-laser array scanner

A multipurpose 3-laser slide array scanner

Biomek 2000 workstation

The Biomek workstation is a liquid handling system for general purpose plates setup

Nanodrop ND-1000

The Nanodrop ND-1000 is a "cuvette-less" spectrophotometer. One microliter of sample is placed on the pedestal and the Nanodrop stretches the liquid into a column of fixed length.
Fiberoptics is employed to pass filtered light through the stretched column. Absorbance at various wavelengths is measured and reported through an attached computer.