Microarray analysis of rice plants irradiated with carbon ion beams (HIMAC)

In this study, carbon-ion beams generated via the heavy-ion medical accelerator in Chiba (HIMAC) were targeted to growing rice seedlings (7-days-old) to examine their effect on this genome model. Both physiological parameters, such as growth, and molecular events, specially the gene expression profiles were examined immediately after irradiation (at 270 Gy dose) by rice oligo (22K) DNA microarrays. Genome-wide transcriptional profiling of radiation-response genes in rice provides us with first report on how our radioactive environment affects a plant species. Keywords: Irradiation response An in vivo 7-days-old rice seedling model system was used, where whole seedlings were used for exposure to the emitted radiation from HIMAC (carbon ion beams). Dye-swap or reverse labeling with Cy3 and Cy5 dyes procedure was applied followed by hybridization and wash processes, and the hybridized microarrays (G4138A) were scanned using a GenePix microarray scanner followed by the Gene Pix 4000 analysis application program for image analysis and data extraction processes. The GeneSpring Ver. 4 software was used for normalization.