Custom microarray for glycobiologists: considerations for glycosyltransferase gene expression profiling

The development of microarray technology offers the unprecedented possibility of studying the expression of thousands of genes in one experiment. Its exploitation in the glycobiology field will eventually allow the parallel investigation of the expression of many glycosyltransferases, which will ultimately lead to an understanding of the regulation of glycoconjugate synthesis. While numerous gene arrays are available on the market, e.g. the Affymetrix GeneChip® arrays, glycosyltransferases are not adequately represented, which makes comprehensive surveys of their gene expression difficult. This chapter describes the main issues related to the establishment of a custom glycogenes array.