University of Manitoba/MGCB2 Pilot Study C. thermocellum Microarray Experiment

RNA expression observed in stationary relative to exponential phase cells of strain Clostridum thermocellum (ATCC 27405) grown on cellobiose. b) Comparative RNA expression of 3 Clostridium thermocellu strains (DSM 1237, 2650, and 4150) grown to mid exponential phase on cellobiose. There are 2 purposes for this experiment. 1) Purpose 1 was to verify whether observed differences in fermentation end-product ratios are reflected in differences in RNA expression profiles. Micro Array data will be compared with the same experiments performed with RNA seq and with proteomic experiments. Purpose 2 was to improve our general understanding of the genomes of these strains by doing the experiments on a chip that combined the current genome information for all three strains. It is expected that the Micro Array will confirm that these genomes as currently available are incomplete. Each test condition was provided as 6 biological replicates in order to test the sample to sample variability intrinsic to this type of sample. Statistical analysis will reveal the number of replacates needed to ensure stable results