Regeneration of comparative genomic hybridization oligonucleotide microarrays with dimethylurea

Abstract

Reuse of materials in DNA hybridization-based methods has been known since the advent of Southern membranes. Array-based comparative genomic hybridization is essentially Southern hybridization with multiple probes immobilized on a solid surface. We show that comparative genomic hybridization microarrays fabricated with maskless array synthesizer technology can be used up to four times with the application of 1,3-dimethylurea as an array-stripping agent. We reproducibly detected chromosomal aberrations (0.6–22.4Mb in size) in four hybridization rounds using regenerated microarray slides. We also demonstrated that regenerated arrays can detect smaller alterations (16–200kbp), such as common copy number variants, as well as complex aberration profiles in tumor DNA.