Universal Microarray System (UMAS) to investigate yeast response to galactose. Saccharomyces cerevisiae

We describe a transcriptional analysis platform consisting of a universal micro-array system (UMAS) combined with an enzymatic manipulation step that is capable of generating expression profiles from any organism without requiring a priori species-specific sequence information. The transcriptome is converted to cDNA and processed with restriction endonucleases to generate low-complexity pools (80–120) of equal length DNA fragments. The resulting material is amplified and detected with the UMAS system, comprising all possible 4,096 (4^6) DNA hexamers. Ligation to the arrays yields thousands of 14-mer sequence tags. The compendium of signals from all pools in the array-of-universal arrays comprises a full-transcriptome expression profile. The technology was validated by analysis of the galactose response of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and the resulting profiles showed excellent agreement with the literature and real-time PCR assays. Keywords: other