Microarrays Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Microarrays, including details on experiments, designs, statistics, analysis, software.

Cross-species microarray hybridizations: a developing tool for studying species diversity.

Bar-Or C, Czosnek H, Koltai H

Department of Ornamental Horticulture, ARO Volcani Center, Bet Dagan, Israel, 50250; The Robert H. Smith Institute of Plant Science and Genetics in Agriculture, Faculty of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Quality Sciences, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Rehovot, Israel, 76100.

The use of cross-species hybridization (CSH) to DNA microarrays, in which the target RNA and microarray probe are from different species, has increased in the past few years. CSH is used in comparative, evolutionary and ecological studies of closely related species, and for gene-expression profiling of many species that lack a representative microarray platform. However, unlike species-specific hybridization, CSH is still considered a non-standard use of microarrays. Here, we present the recent developments in the field of CSH for cDNA and oligomer microarray platforms. We discuss issues that influence the quality of CSH results, including platform choice, experiment design and data analysis, and suggest strategies that can lead to improvement of CSH studies to investigate species diversity.

Published 2 April 2007 in Trends Genet, 23(4): 200-207.
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