Agilent Microarrays
Agilent offers 60-mer oligo microarrays, which are highly sensitive arrays with up-to-date content and coverage. The 60-mer format provides enhancements in sensitivity over 25-mer formats (5-8x more sensitive) partly due to the larger area available for hybridization. Agilent oligo microarrays use only one 60-mer per gene/transcript. 60-mers are also more tolerant of sequence mismatches, which results in simplified analysis of highly polymorphic regions through the use of longer probes.
Custom oligonucleotide-based microarrays can also be purchased through Agilent. Up to 22,000 oligonucleotides per microarray currently can be synthesized for custom arrays. Agilent's inkjet printing format allows for rapid design changes so researchers can tailor the array's design to experimental needs as they change over time.
The FGSR offers microarray services for Agilent's 4 X 44K slide formats, which have four arrays containing 44,000 spots each printed per glass microscope slide. Slides are sold in batches of 5, and with 4 arrays/slide, a minimum purchase yields 20 arrays. Arrays can be used as one-color or two-color and are scanned using FGSR's GenePix 4000B scanner, which uses GenePix software and generates TIF (image) and .gpr (GenePix Results) files. The .gpr file is a tab-delimited text file that can be opened in Excel and is accepted by the majority of microarray data analysis software. Agilent also offers a software package available for purchase called the Feature Extraction Software. It provides very detailed QC reports on each slide, a text file listing the data values for each feature on each array, an xml file containing data, and other files detailing such things as grid positioning. Most software will import FE data files easily, especially GeneSpring, which is also an Agilent product.
Agilent offerings include standard full genome human, mouse, and rat arrays as well as a large variety of other model organisms including Arabidopsis, C. elegans, yeast, and chicken.
