Affymetrix Updates Genomes-on-a-Chip

Courtesy of Affymetrix

Microarray giant Affymetrix has updated two of its more popular expression sets. With the release of the GeneChip^® Mouse Expression Set 430 and Rat Expression Set 230, the company now provides "the most comprehensive, reliable, and up-to-date versions of public domain rat and mouse genome information available on a microarray platform," according to a company press release. "It's an evolution of the product line," explains Elizabeth Kerr, senior director of marketing, at the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company. "Really it's an update with regard to content."

Both chip sets are based on public sequence databases, which the company crosschecked against 2002 drafts of the mouse and rat genomes. The mouse arrays cover over 39,000 transcripts and the rat chips represent 30,000; both contain a selection of 100 housekeeping genes per chip for experiment control and normalization. Each transcript is represented by a collection of 11 pairs of...