Taking The Measure Of The Message

Date: November 23, 1998

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Getting a measure of even a single RNA species has never been easy. Every few years, a new technique comes along--Northerns, ribonuclease protection assays, RT-PCR--that makes the task only incrementally easier. But a quantum leap in technology took place just a few years ago with the introduction of cDNA arrays, and suddenly not just one but hundreds to thousands of target nucleic acids can be analyzed simultaneously and precisely. Since then, array technology has become a growth industry as new tools for making, probing, imaging, and analyzing arrays are being introduced almost daily.

Old-Fashioned Way: One Message at a Time

Scan of Incyte's UniGEM Microarray. Image courtesy of Genome Syatems.

Quantitating mRNAs has been fraught with difficulties due to the lability of RNA and the vanishingly small amounts typically present in cells. Consequently, techniques that are robust and sensitive have been in demand. High...