The conventional gene expression profiling approaches have been replaced with DNA microarrays with exhibiting a powerful high-throughput capacity. Most solid surfaces of DNA microarrays contain such a high area density of functional groups to immobilize capture DNAs to the surface that the hybridization of capture DNAs with cDNA can be hindered, resulting in low intensity and reproducibility. Since our previous works showed that the 9-acid dendron was able to increase the hybridization efficiency, we aimed to demonstrate the feasibility of 9-acid dendron-coated glass slides as an advanced microarray platform for gene expression profiling. The 9-acid dendron-coated DNA microarray could reproducibly obtain the expression levels of 2800 human cancer-associated genes in the two liver cancer lines: Hep3B and SK-Hep1. Among the differentially expressed genes, Caveolin-1 (Cav-1) was identified as the most highly up-regulated gene in invasive SK-Hep1 in comparison to non-motile Hep3B. The overexpression of Cav-1 in Hep3B promoted the cell invasion, whereas its knockdown in SK-Hep1 suppressed the invasive feature, which confirms that the overexpression of Cav-1 is closely associated with cell invasion of liver carcinoma. Collectively, the 9-acid dendron-coated surface could successfully detect the transcript levels of cells, demonstrating its feasible potential to identify the candidate genes for further functional studies or diagnosis of diseases.
Keywords: 9-Acid dendron; Caveolin-1; Cell invasion; DNA microarray; Gene expression profiling; Liver cancer.