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.
genome Technology Center 