DNA microarray applications in functional genomics

The successful completion of the Human Genome Project and the achievement of similar goals in other species have generated a huge amount of free available information about the genomic sequence of different organisms, opening the door to a postgenome era where new challenges arise. One of the most ambitious objectives of this new period, addressed by the emerging discipline of functional genomics, attempts to understand the genome and the products it encodes for, and how these gene products interact to produce complex living organisms. This new era is also characterized by the development of new technologies, which have produced genomic tools indispensable for understanding how gene products are regulated in normal and diseased conditions on a global genome scale. One of these technologies is DNA microarrays, turned into a very popular tool in the last years. Although the most common use of DNA microarrays is gene expression profiling, scientists have successfully used them for multiple applications, including genotyping, sequencing, DNA copy number analysis, and DNA-protein interactions, among others. In summary, DNA microarrays are changing the way biomedicine and other disciplines are addressing different biological questions and will allow the translation of genome research to the clinic.