Expression profiling by oligonucleotide microarrays spotted on coated polymer slides.

We have developed a ready-to-spot polymer microarray slide, which is coated with a uniform layer of reactive electrophilic groups using anthraquinone-mediated photo-coupling chemistry. The slide coating reduces the hydrophobicity of the native polymer significantly, thereby enabling robust and efficient one-step coupling of spotted 5' amino-linked oligonucleotides onto the polymer slide. The utility of the coated polymer slide in gene expression profiling was assessed by fabrication of spotted oligonucleotide microarrays using a collection of 5' amino-linked 70-mer oligonucleotide probes representing 96 yeast genes from Operon.

Competitive quantitative measurement of the AMPA receptor gene expression at the single cell level.

Our laboratory has developed a competitive reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) procedure to analyse the mRNA expression of the alpha-amino-3-hydroxy-5-methylisoxazole-4-propionate (AMPA) receptor subunits in single cells. By the use of an internal RNA standard competing equally with the four subunit's mRNA, we have analysed 283 whole single hippocampus CA1 cells from adult rat brain. The cells were sampled from three groups of animals: one control group, one group subjected to preconditioning ischemia, and one group subjected to global cerebral ischemia.