MicroArray.ca
Title
University Health Network Microarray Centre
Description
The UHN Microarray Centre was established in early 1998. At that time, the Microarray Centre was housed at the Ontario Cancer Institute, the research centre for the Princess Margaret Hospital. Over the course of approximately one year, the Microarray Centre worked with a local engineering company, Engineering Services Inc. (ESI) to develop the arrayer robot and to turn it into a high precision, highly flexible device capable of making very dense arrays. The arrayer is now sold commercially as the BioRad VersArray ChipWriter Pro.
The Microarray Centre was established as part of a consortium of research institutions including the Ontario Cancer Institute, Mount Sinai Hospital, the Hospital for Sick Children and the University of Toronto. We also had a few commercial partnerships and collaborations, including Allelix Biopharmaceuticals (now NPS Allelix), GeneFocus and Engineering Services Inc. During the development of the robotic systems, the Microarray Centre grew to increase our capacity to prepare clones for arraying. We continued to refine our protocols which were adapted from those originally published by Patrick Brown's group at Stanford.
In November of 1999, the UHN Microarray Centre expanded into new facilities which were renovated in large part due to a financial award from the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI). These new faciliteis accommodated further expansion. An award from the Ontario Research and Development Challenge Fund (ORDCF) allowed us to form the Ontario Microarray Network, consisting of microarray cores at Guelph, McMaster and Queen's Universities, coordinated by the main laboratory at the UHN. Our team now stands at 28 people including research scientists, technical staff, engineers, bioinformaticians, management and administrative support. Currently the Microarray Centre houses 6 highly accurate arrayers, capable of producing a total of 2500 arrays with up to 36,000 features per week. We provide arrays, training and support to over 300 labs in 27 different coutries on 6 continents.
Additional Information
Related Domains
- Analysis
- Bioinformatics
- Canada
- Chip On Chip
- Comparative Hybridization
- Cp G
- Cp G Island
- Dna
- Dna Array
- Dna Chips
- Gene Expression
- Genetics
- Genomics
- Human
- Microarray Service
- Microarrays
- Mouse
- Ontario
- Promoter Array
- Proteomics
- Quantitation
- Science And Environment
- Toronto
- Toronto Microarray
- University Health Network
- Yeast
- CpG
- CpG Island
- DNA
- DNA Array
- DNA Chips
- Localities
- North America
- Regional
- Science and Environment