Quality Control -- Spotted Arrays
Spotted glass microarrays come in many varieties and have many applications. Generally, a spotted glass microarray consists of a glass microscope slide spotted with a DNA, RNA, or protein target. DNA targets include oligonucleotides, PCR-products amplified from cDNA clones, and BAC clones and their like. RNA targets can include microRNAs.
The Microarray Core Facility no longer prints any microarrays. We do, however, offer processing of spotted arrays purchased from other sources (academic and commercial). We routinely process Agilent and NimbleGen arrays.
There are numerous quality control and quality assurance steps in ensuring that the data gleaned from microarray experiments is 'good'. The general breakdown of QA/QC when dealing with spotted glass arrays is as follows: