RIP-CHIP in Drug Development

Microarrays are extensively used to evaluate the effects of compounds on gene expression in the cells. Most of the studies so far have analyzed the transcriptome of the cell. The basic assumption of this approach is that the changes in gene expression occur at the level of transcription of a gene. However, changes often occur at the posttranscriptional level and are not reflected in the analysis of whole transcriptome. We have pioneered the development of “ribonomic profiling” as a high-throughput method to study posttranscriptional regulation of gene expression in the cell. This method is also often referred to as RIP-CHIP. In this chapter, we describe how to use the RIP-CHIP technology to assess the posttranscriptional changes occurring in the cell in response to treatment with a drug.