Genetic analyses on DNA microarrays

A great stir has coursed through the genetics community with the advent in 1996 of "chip technologies," a series of related techniques that allow DNA hybridization-based studies to be performed with unprecedented speed and parallelism. All chip technologies have in common a microarray, a small glass chip approximately one square centimeter in area, to which nucleotide sequences are bound. Fluorescently labeled nucleic acids are hybridized to the microarray and imaged with a laser scanner or fluorescence microscope. This unit offers an overview of the two dominant technologies, cDNA microarrays and oligonucleotide chips. It concludes with a discussion regarding how well microarrays perform real-world expression analysis.