Performance characteristics of 65-mer oligonucleotide microarrays

Microarray fabrication using presynthesized long oligonucleotide is becoming increasingly important, but a study of large-scale array productions has not yet been published. We addressed the issue of fabricating oligonucleotide microarrays by spotting commercial presynthesized 65-mers with 5′ amines representing 7500 murine genes. Amine-modified oligonucleotides were immobilized on glass slides having aldehyde groups via transient Schiff base formation followed by reduction to produce a covalent conjugate. When RNA derived from the same source was used for Cy3 and Cy5 labeling and hybridized to the same array, signal intensities spanning three orders of magnitude were observed and the coefficient of variance (CV) between the two channels for all spots was 8 to 10%. To ascertain the reproducibility of ratio determination of these arrays, two triplicate hybridizations (with fluorochrome reversal) comparing RNAs from a fibroblast (NIH3T3) and a breast cancer (JC) cell line were carried out. The 95% confidence interval for all spots in the six hybridizations was 0.60 to 1.66. This level of reproducibility allows use of the full range of pattern finding and discriminant analysis typically applied to complementary DNA (cDNA) microarrays. Further comparative testing was carried out with oligonucleotide microarrays, cDNA microarrays, and reverse transcription (RT)-PCR assays to examine the comparability of results across these different methodologies.