Glycomics

GLYCOMICS (Upcoming)

Glycomics has emerged a fertile field in high throughput microarray technology as many important physiological functions have been attributed to carbohydrate molecules.Carbohydrates are known to mediate various cell functions such as cell-cell interactions, signal transduction, fertility and development, inflammation etc. Carbohydrates arrays comprise arrays of mon- and oligosaccharides, complex polysaccharides, glycoconjugates, glycoproteins etc. We at Kamtek have developed protocols for printing these arrays and for follow up binding and detection assays.

CHIP DESIGN

The carbohydrate chip design is based on following capabilities of our microarrayer:

Provision to print arrays on different size membranes and glass slides.
Capability to print arrays in specific formats based on different combinations of 48 pins in the print head for either gridding with solid pins or printing with quill pins.
Ability to arrange spots in different formats within each array and to adjust spot-to-spot distance.
Allows printing of replicate spots with quill pins, which can be either next to each other or in separate arrays on the same slide.
Prints different/duplicate arrays on the same slide for comparison purposes.
Ability to place positive and negative controls at specific locations on the array.
Printing in batches of up to 100 slides per run.

ARRAY PRINTING

Carbohydrate array printing includes printing of various unmodified or modified sugars and carbohydrate complexes.
Arrays are printed on membranes or on pre-activated slides.
Printing is performed with well-established Robotics and microfluidic systems in HEPA filtered clean environment and humidity-controlled chambers.
Quill-Pin or Stealth Pin technology is used to print on glass slides, and solid pins are used for printing on membrane coated slides and membranes.
We offer printing of high-density arrays (up to15, 000 spots/slide) and for printing in large batches (up to 100 slides/batch).

The system generates gal-file accepted by majority of scanners

BINDING AND DETECTION ASSAYS

We will work with our clients to optimize and perform binding and detection assays based on the different sample types.

SCANNING AND QUANTITATION

We provide custom scanning services to our customers at reasonable rates, which comprise:

Single or dual wavelength scanning of processed arrays with ScanArray Express scanner, which has capability to scan images at 10-micron resolution. The dual wavelength images are scanned one after the other.
Quantitation of scanned images in TIFF format using QuantArray software. The gal file generated by our Microarray Printer is compatible with the ScanArray Express scanner for quantitation purposes.
Conversion of raw data generated by the system into Excel Spread sheet and scatter-plots for further analysis.