Acquisition of a Microarray Facility

University Of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

An integrated microarraying facility will be initiated in the Department of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology (DMMP) in the Center for Health Sciences (CHS) at UCLA. The facility will consist of a DNA processing robot, a microarrayer, a scanner, a DNA/clone resource, and a computational facility. The microarray facility has been designed to provide the highest practicable throughput of this powerful technology. The research will cover the whole range of modern biology including studies of retroviruses, differentiation of neural stem cells and other cells, the cellular response to metals, synaptic transmission, neural growth factors, nitrous oxide physiology, immune system differentiation, neural aspects of behavior and glucocorticoid signaling. An important part is to improve the bioinformatics of microarray technologies using the data provided by the facility. This facility will provide researchers and their students the ability to visualize gene expression patterns for thousands of genes at once and have a major impact on research in cell and molecular biology at UCLA.