The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology
Volume 116, Issue 1 , Pages 56-59, July 2005

Allergy-related genes in microarray: An update review

  • Hirohisa Saito, MD, PhD

      Affiliations

    • Corresponding Author InformationReprint requests: Hirohisa Saito, MD, PhD, Department of Allergy and Immunology, National Research Institute for Child Health and Development, 2-10-1 Okura, Setagaya-ku 157-8535 Tokyo, Japan.
    • ,
  • Jun Abe, MD, PhD
    • ,
  • Kenji Matsumoto, MD, PhD

From the Department of Allergy and Immunology, National Research Institute for Child Health and Development

Received 28 January 2005; received in revised form 6 March 2005; accepted 11 March 2005. published online 24 May 2005.

Tokyo, Japan

Microarrays have attracted tremendous interest among biologists. However, questions have been raised regarding the reproducibility between experiments performed in different laboratories using different platforms. Here, we discuss these problems and reach the following conclusions. First, the reproducibility between different platforms of arrays is low, but bioinformatics may permit compensation at least among oligonucleotide microarrays. Second, it is hard to interpret microarray results generated using mixed cell populations. Hierarchical clustering may be applied to identify whether upregulated transcripts in an inflammatory tissue were caused simply by an increased number of inflammatory cells.

Key words: Microarray, DNA chip, transcriptome, bioinformatics

Abbreviation used: T7-primer, Oligo (dT) primer containing a T7 RNA polymerase promoter

 

 Disclosure of potential conflict of interest: H. Saito received grants/research support in part from the Pharmaceutical and Medical Devices Agency with the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (Millennium Genome Project, MPJ-5) and is employed by the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare only. No commercial association.

PII: S0091-6749(05)00721-9

doi:10.1016/j.jaci.2005.03.048

The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology
Volume 116, Issue 1 , Pages 56-59, July 2005

Article Tools

* Image Usage & Resolution