GeneChip(R) Barley Genome Array offers new tool to accelerate plant biology research

Affymetrix, Inc., (Nasdaq: AFFX) today announced the launch of the GeneChip® brand Barley Genome Array, the first commercially available barley microarray. This array was created through a worldwide collaboration of barley researchers and contains a comprehensive collection of barley transcript sequence information, including all known barley genes.

The GeneChip Barley Genome Array features over 22,700 sequences, including more than 1,000 genes from the National Center for Biotechnology Information database, plus more than 20,000 barley genes identified from partial cDNA (EST) sequences. Researchers will use the GeneChip Barley Genome Array to study malting properties, responses to environmental stress, pest and disease control, nutritional characteristics and reproductive development.

The GeneChip Barley Genome Array was made possible by a worldwide collaboration of barley researchers from the U.S., Germany, Japan, Scotland and Finland, and is comprised of barley transcript sequence information from 84 cDNA libraries. These diverse groups worked through the United States Department of Agriculture-Initiative for Future Agriculture and Food System's (USDA-IFAFS) Triticeae Improvement Group, which funded and designed the array in consultation with Affymetrix. The array sequences were submitted by the USDA-IFAFS-funded team to Affymetrix who then completed the rigorous probe set selection, review and verification work.

"This community sharing of large amounts of raw data resulted in a significant improvement of chip content quality through more accurate gene sequences, better sequence clustering, and deeper gene coverage than would have been possible otherwise," said Timothy Close, Professor and Geneticist at University of California at Riverside and member of the (USDA-IFAFS) Triticeae Improvement Group. "The leading groups in the worldwide barley community made a collective decision in January 2002 to standardize our expression profiling data using the GeneChip platform. Everyone joined together in this objective. We have been pleased with the outcome."

Roger Wise, a United States Department of Agriculture-Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS) Research Geneticist and Professor in Iowa State University's Department of Plant Pathology said, "This is a tremendous advance for researchers working on small grain cereal crops. My laboratory has run over a hundred samples on the array to date, and the information derived from these experiments will significantly accelerate our research goals."