detection of low expressed genes - (Sep/22/2005 )

Hello,

for my PhD study I plan to use Affymetrix oligonucleotide arrays for gene expression profiling of arthritic mouse paws. I am interested in a special group of genes, which includes a variety of cytokines. Now I read, that genes with very low active concentrations i.e. cytokines, can not be detected. I had a look at some data of collegues and it is correct, genes of interest are not detectable.
What can I do? Is there an advantage of costum made arrays?

Thanks for your help. Yvonne

I am not quite sure if this is going to help.
One of my colleagues is doing cytokine array on mouse cells.
It is a protein array though, and she used a microarray software to analyze her data, which look pretty nice.