Comparative Functional GenomicsBiology 431 Spring 2008 |
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March 6th 2008Molly Schumer and Amanda TrailTwo Reviews And One Research Paper Food by Laila and MargaretWho is Who by Kelsey and AlexShort Oligonucleotide arrays are a type of microarray
that allows for the detection of RNAs at a very low concentration (one
company that makes them Affymetrix, claims that you can unambiguously
detect RNAs present in a 1/300,000 frequency). The arrays have upto 500,000
unique probes that correspond to >10,000 genes. To form the unique
probes, multiple small sequences of around 25 base pairs are selected
for each gene. Having redundant sequences on an array is important for
detecting false positives, but unlike cDNA microarrays, oligonucleotide
arrays contain unique sequences designed to hybridize to the same RNA. SOME OTHER TERMS YOU MIGHT WANT TO KNOW Glial cells are non-neuronal cells that are integral in neural function. They form the myelin sheath, maintain homeostasis, and provide protection and support for neurons. Astrocytes are a type of glial cell that are now thought
to signal to neurons and affect their activity. click Fibroblasts make and maintain the extracellular matrix in some tissues, basically act as a tissue support structure. Neutral theory is a theory of molecular evolution that states that the vast majority of mutations have a neutral effect on the fitness of the organism. This model predicts that new alleles arise though single-nucleotide mutations that accumulate linearly with time. See “Evolution of Primate Gene Expression” article (pg 694) for more details. Cluster analysis, or data segmentation, is the partitioning of (in this case) gene expression sequences into discrete species-specific groups. Probe sets are a series of probes on an oligonucleotide array that collectively correspond to a specific cDNA. This set up allows for the recognition of species at different taxonomic levels and an assessment of biodiversity through microarray analysis. Human specific pattern of hybridization refers to the sets of genes that were either up-regulated or down-regulated in the human arrays compared to the chimpanzees and rhesus macaques in this study. Cis regulatory changes are regions of sequence adjacent to the gene of interest that affect regulation and expression of that gene. An example would be a mutation in a promoter region that causes increased expression, but cis regulatory elements can be up to 1 Mb away according to some papers. Trans regulatory changes are elements that affect the regulation of a gene usually as an associated protein. As a result their corresponding sequence can be located anywhere in the genome and can have diverse and widespread effects on expression.
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