Fire ant adult vs brood comparison for microarray quality control. Solenopsis invicta

Ants display a range of fascinating behaviors, a remarkable level of intra-species phenotypic plasticity and many other interesting characteristics. Here we present a new tool to study the molecular mechanisms underlying these traits: a tentatively annotated expressed sequence tag (EST) resource for the fire ant Solenopsis invicta. From a normalized cDNA library we obtained 21,715 ESTs, which represent 11,864 putatively different transcripts with very diverse molecular functions. All ESTs were used to construct a cDNA microarray. We compared mixed adults to mixed brood to test the quality of the microarrays. Keywords: microarray quality control Overall design: We compared RNA from 1 biological replicate of each mixed adults and mixed brood. We generated amplified adult and brood RNA 2 and 3 independent times, respectively. Amplified and labeled RNA was hybridized to a total of 4 microarrays. Two microarrays were brood vs adult and two were dye swaps.