Here appears the authoritative and insightful review of this article by Charles Auffrey, which is also the 100th evaluation of PLoSONE articles at the Faculty of 1000 Biology.

Below is the simplified version of Auffrey’s evaluation of the article. Full evaluation can be read at F1000Biology website [here:http://www.f1000biology.c...]

‘The novel microfluidic device described in this paper transforms real-time quantitative PCR into a much higher throughput technology for gene expression measurement. The authors have used a dynamic array of microfluidic channels, valves and nanoliter reaction chambers to perform simultaneously 2304 real-time qPCR assays, monitoring expression of 45 human genes in 18 tissues with very high sensitivity (down to <10>0.99). The results presented compare very well with those obtained with conventional microliter RT-PCR, outperforming DNA microarrays. Miniaturization and parallelization result in faster delivery of results with much less reagents and handling. This technological advance should prove useful for validation of expression profile signatures obtained with microarrays, and their extensive use for diagnosis and prognosis. In order to compete directly with microarrays for transcriptome analysis, the number of genes that can be assayed in parallel would have to be increased by at least two orders of magnitude’.

F1000 Factor: 6.0
Tag: Must Read

Evaluated by: Charles Auffrey [Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) - UMR 7091, France]

Evaluated on: July 15, 2008

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