Scaling of nucleic acid assays on microelectrophoresis array devices: high-dynamic range multi-gene readout from less than ten transcripts.

In this paper we describe progress in using the prodigious data-collecting ability of multilane microelectrophoresis instruments to bear on problems in scaled nucleic acid assays. We emphasize compound stacking and solid-support loading as means to concentrate <100 pg samples for direct injection. Reaction Mapping is applied to readout quantitative polymerase chain reaction gene-expression and as a way to practically overcome difficulty in interpreting amplification curves of multiplexed quantitative polymerase chain reaction at 20-50 gene/well complexity. We demonstrate multiplexed readout of gene expression over an abundancy range of 9 Log 2 units starting with reverse-transcribed samples as small as five molecules in each sample.