OGT’s miRNA profiling service provides rapid answers for disease research

Oxford Gene Technology (OGT), the pioneer of microarray-based technologies, is pleased to announce the launch of a new microRNA (miRNA) profiling service designed to help researchers accelerate their discoveries. The flexible and cost-effective service offers high quality, customisable microarrays with the most up-to-date miRNA probe sequences, providing data from samples in just a few days.

In developing this service, OGT has co-funded the design of novel miRNA microarrays with the MolPAGE project (Molecular Phenotyping to Accelerate Genomic Epidemiology), a pan European consortium co-ordinated by Oxford University that focuses on diabetes and vascular disease. MicroRNAs are thought to be influential in the onset of diabetes and there is growing interest in their regulation of processes such as glucose homeostasis, insulin secretion and adipocyte differentiation. This new microarray will be used to measure the expression levels of mature miRNA and miRNA star sequences (miRNA*) in biomarker discovery samples.

Dr Mike Evans, Chief Executive at OGT said: ”OGT aims to be at the forefront of emerging technology and welcomes the opportunity to network with leading scientists in Europe. Our multi-array methodology allows for up to sixteen samples to be tested per slide, and has been optimised for high specificity, reproducibility, and low inter-array variability. The arrays are suitable for diverse studies in several eukaryotic species.”