Applied Biosystems announced the commercial availability of the Rat Genome Survey Microarray for use with its proprietary Expression Array System. The product is based on content from public sources and from sister-company Celera’s database. The array contains 26,857 probes for interrogation of 27,088 genes, the firm said, and includes more than 10,000 genes not covered by other commercial microarrays. In addition, the company introduced AmpFLSTR Yfiler, a PCR amplification kit, for the specific detection of male DNA. The product introduction includes the availability of a haplotype database containing over 3,000 population samples typed using the Yfiler kit.
VizX Labs has launched the GeneSifter Data Center, an online library of microarray data available through the firm’s web-based GeneSifter microarray data analysis system. The firm said the data center continually adds datasets from microarray studies in vascular biology, neurology, cancer biology, and immunology. Each data set is accompanied by short papers that highlight how significant results were obtained from the data.
The Mouse Transcriptome Project has started releasing reference data sets of expression profiles for a large subset of genes in the C57BL/6J genome. The project utilizes Lynx Therapeutics’ Massively Parallel Signature Sequencing technology, and when finished will consist of roughly 90 tissue samples from male and female mice. The data for finished tissue in a queriable form and mapped to the mouse genome is available at http://sgbpub.lynxgen.com, while downloadable datasets are available from the NCBI GEO website at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo.
The Allen Institute for Brain Science has released gene expression data for nearly 2,000 genes from the mouse genome, marking the first major data release from its Allen Brain Atlas. The institute said the genes represent about 10 percent of the mouse genome, and the release comes with tools to analyze the data at http://www.brainatlas.org or http://www.brain-map.org.