Studying Gene Expression Profiles of UV-Irradiated Human Keratinocytes by cDNA Microarray

The goal of this thesis is to study the response of a human keratinocyte cell line (HaCaT cells) after UVB irradiation. In order to develop a system for UV irradiation, we firtstly studied the UV illumination system to find out a stable and reliable condition for UV irradiation experiments. Further, we found out the proper dose of UVB radiation and time points after UVB irradiation by performing MTT assay and trypan blue viability test. According to the results of MTT assay and trypan blue viability test, the cellular activity as well as survival rate of UVB-irradiated cells were in proportion to the radiation doses within a lower UVB dose range. We wanted to find out the possible reasons for this phenomenon by using cDNA microarray. We hope the thesis could be a guide for the following researches, and be useful in the clinical studies about the UV damage. Keywords: dose response and time course Loop-designed microarray experiments were performed in our study. Twenty-one samples are arranges as seven small loops and one large loop, with three and seven microarray slides for each small and large loop, respectively. This set of loop-designed microarray experiment contains one control untreated (non UVB-treated) samples and two UVB-treated samples (one low dose and one high dose UVB-treated) at each time point (total seven time points).