Bertone Paul, Gerstein Mark, Snyder Michael
Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520-8103, USA.
Chromosome Res. 2005;13(3):259-74. doi: 10.1007/s10577-005-2165-0.
Microarrays have become a popular and important technology for surveying global patterns in gene expression and regulation. A number of innovative experiments have extended microarray applications beyond the measurement of mRNA expression levels, in order to uncover aspects of large-scale chromosome function and dynamics. This has been made possible due to the recent development of tiling arrays, where all non-repetitive DNA comprising a chromosome or locus is represented at various sequence resolutions. Since tiling arrays are designed to contain the entire DNA sequence without prior consultation of existing gene annotation, they enable the discovery of novel transcribed sequences and regulatory elements through the unbiased interrogation of genomic loci. The implementation of such methods for the global analysis of large eukaryotic genomes presents significant technical challenges. Nonetheless, tiling arrays are expected to become instrumental for the genome-wide identification and characterization of functional elements. Combined with computational methods to relate these data and map the complex interactions of transcriptional regulators, tiling array experiments can provide insight toward a more comprehensive understanding of fundamental molecular and cellular processes.
微阵列已成为一种用于研究基因表达和调控全局模式的流行且重要的技术。一些创新性实验已将微阵列应用扩展到mRNA表达水平测量之外，以揭示大规模染色体功能和动态的各个方面。这得益于平铺阵列的最新发展得以实现，在平铺阵列中，包含染色体或基因座的所有非重复DNA以各种序列分辨率呈现。由于平铺阵列被设计为包含整个DNA序列而无需事先参考现有的基因注释，它们能够通过对基因组位点的无偏倚询问来发现新的转录序列和调控元件。在大型真核生物基因组的全局分析中实施此类方法面临重大技术挑战。尽管如此，平铺阵列有望成为全基因组功能元件识别和表征的重要工具。结合计算方法来关联这些数据并绘制转录调节因子的复杂相互作用，平铺阵列实验可以为更全面地理解基本分子和细胞过程提供见解。
