Abstract
In recent years, the DNA microarray has become one of the most powerful tools for toxicogenomic studies. However, microarray technology is still in its early stages, and standardized analytical methods of cDNA microarray analysis have not been clearly established. These differences in methodology can result in data variability in gene expression profiling. Although many analytical methods have been proposed to resolve these problems, they are not practical methods in the field of ecotoxicology because environmental samples are limited and microarray experiments are quite expensive. Here we examined the basic analytical methods of cDNA microarrays using yeast cells to standardize yeast cDNA microarray technology for toxicogenomics. We attempted to appear practical methods to obtain reliable yeast cDNA microarray data from a minimum number of experiments. We propose that our experimental conditions (exponentially growing yeast cells (A660=1.0) in YPD medium) were reproducible for cDNA microarray experiments with a correlation factor of approximately 9.0. In addition, reliable data was obtained when we selected induced genes whose expression levels increased more than 2.0-fold in at least two of the three independent experiments.
