Dr. Peter Hoyt was recently awarded money to purchase an Axon/MDS 4400A 4-laser microarray confocal scanning instrument. The money was graciously supplied as part of the Core Facility Support Program from the Office of the Vice President for Research and Technology Transfer. The new instrument has twice the resolution of the Perkin Elmer ScanArray Express (which is barely sometimes working) enabling users to scan microarrays with as small as 13-micron features. The ability to use four lasers means that microarrays, protein arrays or other expreiments performed on a microscope slide can have three experimental samples along with a single control. The ability to perform triplicate experiments simultaneously will reduce the cost of microarray experiements, while dramatically improving the variability seen between replicates. The new scanner is installed and available March12, 2009.

The instrument comes with GenePix Pro v. 7 which allows for new capabilities. You can now scan multiple areas of one slide as independent scans. Because the entire system is running on a 64-bit system, the four processors and 8Gb of memory are all available to the number crunching algorythms.  The instrument and software are available for the reasonable price of $20 per half day (8AM to 12-Noon, or 12:01PM to 5PM... no exceptions) or $30 for a 24-hour period.