Expression profiles of individual human oocytes using microarray technology

Microarray technology is a relatively new technique that provides the investigator with the ability to monitor and quantify the expression of thousands of genes simultaneously. This technological breakthrough has the potential to provide detailed insight into cellular processes involved in the regulation of gene expression. In this study, microarray methods were used to examine the expression of linearly amplified RNA from individual and pooled (n = 5) human oocytes. The amplification strategy consistently produced a complex representative cDNA population. A catalogue of 1361 transcripts expressed in human oocytes was identified, of which 406 have been independently confirmed using other methods.