Agilent Technologies Expands miRNA Microarray Catalog with New Human, Mouse and Rat Assays

Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: A) today introduced three new microRNA microarray designs: Human miRNA Microarray v2.0, Mouse miRNA Microarray v1.0 and Rat miRNA Microarray v1.0. All are based on the Sanger Institute’s miRBase 10.1, updated in December 2007.

“Researchers tell us that they value specificity and sensitivity above other attributes, and this plays well to Agilent’s strengths in microarray manufacturing,” said Yvonne Linney, Agilent vice president and general manager, Genomics. “Our breakthrough direct-labeling method requires very small amounts of sample input, and the flexibility of our SurePrint inkjet fabrication platform makes it extremely easy to update content as it becomes available.”

The updated Human miRNA Microarray v2.0 contains 723 human and 76 human viral probe sets. Viral miRNAs are increasingly associated with some cancers, so Agilent included these probe sets to provide additional value for cancer researchers.

The new Mouse miRNA Microarray v1.0 contains all known mouse and mouse gamma herpes virus miRNAs. There are 567 mouse and 10 mouse gamma herpes virus distinct probe sets.

The new Rat miRNA Microarray v1.0 contains all 350 known rat miRNA probe sets.

Agilent launched the first comprehensive microarray system for expression profiling of human miRNAs in April 2007, and it has been positively received by the research community.

“Tumor-specific predictors based on high-throughput nucleic acid assays offer significant advances over current clinically -derived models,” said David Neil Hayes, M.D., assistant professor of medicine, Division of Hematology/Oncology, University of North Carolina School of Medicine. The Hayes team is studying glioblastoma, a highly aggressive type of brain tumor. “My team is on the cusp of being able to correlate a tumor’s genetic pattern to clinically -relevant events. We would be hard-pressed to reach this ability in such a short period of time to elucidate a tumor’s genetic pattern and understand the regulatory networks between miRNA and gene expression, without the use of Agilent’s miRNA and gene expression arrays.”

The Agilent miRNA microarray platform’s limit of detection is less than 1 attomole with a dynamic range of five orders of magnitude. Probe specificity and the unique labeling procedure discriminates individual miRNAs. Agilent’s novel method for efficiently labeling miRNA in total RNA eliminates tedious size fractionation and requires only 100 nanograms of input RNA from precious samples.

The Agilent miRNA assays are delivered as eight 15K arrays per standard 1in. x 3in. glass slide. The Human v2.0 kit, Mouse v1.0 kit and Rat v1.0 kit are each available as two different pack sizes: one slide with eight arrays or three slides with 24 arrays. The human, mouse and rat miRNA assays are also available as individual slides, each containing eight microarrays. This helps users tailor purchases to their research requirements.

For more information about Agilent’s upgraded miRNA portfolio, please visit www.opengenomics.com.