Expression Profiling at the Microscale
Wenzhong Xiao, Tian Wang
Greater than 106 cells are usually required for microarray analysis of transcriptome. There are many situations when repeated samples are required from very small tissues, or when a small number of cells that have huge impact on the organism as a whole, such as metastatic cells in cancer, are the target of analysis. Our goal is to develop and optimize methods for global expression profiling of 1-100 cells. In addition, we are developing a universal platform for the evaluation of different expression profiling approaches. Overall, we aim to set standards for high-quality expression profiling in the scientific community, and to enable routine profiling of precious clinical samples.