The new UW Center for Expression Arrays (CEA), located in the Rosen Building in the south Lake Union neighborhood of Seattle, allows researchers to examine the expression of thousands of genes simultaneously. Microarray technology complements older techniques, which allow scientists to see changes in only a few genes at a time.

“This center can assist anybody on campus who is interested in gene expression. Almost anyone doing biology wants to know what genes are active in the cells that they are studying,” said Dr. Roger Bumgarner, the center’s director and a research assistant professor of microbiology.

The technology is important to a variety of biomedical studies ranging from specific disease research to developmental biology studies. The technology is also used to investigate the effects of exposure to drugs and toxins.

One satisfied customer is Dr. Theo Bammler, senior fellow in environmental health, who studies aflatoxin—a carcinogen present in poorly stored food products. Aflatoxin is associated with liver cancer and is considered a major public-health problem in some developing countries. Bammler and his colleagues want to know what genes are turned on and off in a healthy liver cell, as well as what genes are turned on and off in a cell exposed to aflatoxin. For the past several years, they have used traditional techniques to examine these changes one or two genes at a time.

In the Department of Microbiology, several researchers are using microarrays to study processes associated with viral or bacterial infection.

“One of the things we’re interested in is understanding what is going on in the host cell when it is infected,” Bumgarner said. “We’d like to do that with lots of different viruses and lots of different cells. We want to have a global view of the common strategies that viruses use to evade the host cell’s natural defenses.”