Longmers

About the use of longmers of up to 60mers with the Geniom Technology.

How does it work?

When dealing with the complexities of probe set design and probe specific signal interpretation, the influence of probe sequences and length on bias and random measurement noise have to be observed. Depending on the application, the use of shortmers that are about 25 bp in length can be advantageous as they are viewed as high-specificity probes. However, longmers of up to 60mers are believed to be more sensitive, due to the longer sequence stretch available for hybridization. Longmers are also more tolerant of sequence mismatches, simplifying the analysis of highly polymorphic regions. As sequence knowledge grows at an increasing pace, the advantages of longmers become more and more substantial.

Why longmers?

The use of the longmer synthesis set enables the generation of up to 60mers within the Geniom® Biochip, with array design and capture probe setup being easily adapted to any kind of application. The careful design and selection of the probes give improved experimental control of hybridization properties, and systematic targeting of specific gene sub-sequences allows for better discrimination of highly similar targets such as splice variants or gene families.

How can you use longmers?

The use of longmers works with the Geniom Microarray Facility (read more) and the Geniom RT Analyzer (read more).

Reliable data with longmers

Performance of 50mer-probes on Geniom Biochips: Scatter plot of 3 μg of genomic Drosophila melanogaster DNA vs. 4,5 μg of genomic Drosophila melano gaster DNA hybridized to Geniom Arrays with 50mer-probes (statistical Pearson correlation coefficient of 0,98).