Journal Article Details the Use of Ligo-miR EZ for Quantifying miRNA Copy Number

Circulomics has recently published its first article describing the use of Ligo-miR technology for multiplexed miRNA profiling. The article entitled "Determination of absolute expression profiles using multiplexed miRNA analysis" was published in PLoS ONE with collaborators Dr. Tza-Huei Wang, Dr. Stephen Meltzer, and Dr. Kevin Yarema of Johns Hopkins University as well as Dr. Carlo Croce of Ohio State University.

This paper details the simplest version of Ligo-miR. Ligo-miR EZ uses fluorescent PAGE detection to perform up to 24-plex profiling and requires only a thermal cycler and PAGE system, equipment readily available in most molecular biology labs. It shows high correlation to both Agilent miRNA Microarray and Applied Biosystems TaqMan qRT-PCR assays.

Furthermore, absolute copy numbers can be determined using the included spike-in controls and by running four reference samples. Sensitivity is as low as 20 copies per cell at 75 ng input levels. Follow up versions of Ligo-miR technology are currently under development that will increase sensitivity to single cell levels and enable up to 60-plex profiling using CE detection.