Microfabricated systems for nucleic acid analysis

High throughput and automation of nucleic acid analysis are required in order to exploit the information that has been accumulated from the Human Genome Project. Microfabricated analytical systems enable parallel sample processing, reduced analysis-times, low consumption of sample and reagents, portability, integration of various analytical procedures and automation. This review article discusses miniaturized analytical systems for nucleic acid amplification, separation by capillary electrophoresis, sequencing and hybridization. Microarrays are also covered as a new analytical tool for global analysis of gene expression. Thus. instead of studying the expression of a single gene or a few genes at a time we can now obtain the expression profiles of thousands of genes in a single experiment.