Courtesy of Agilent
Perhaps no technology better embodies the spirit of the post-genomics age than the microarray. If genome sequencing projects listed the parts that make up an organism – be it a mouse, a fly, or a human – DNA microarrays, or "biochips," provide the first real application for that information.
Microarrays are addressable assemblies of nucleotide sequences tethered to a solid surface, each of which represents a single gene, splice variant, or other DNA element. Armed with these tools, scientists can probe the expression of every gene represented on the array – sometimes numbering in the tens of thousands – in parallel, all on the surface of a single glass microscope slide.
They can ask which genes are over- or under-expressed in diseased cells, or in response to drug treatments. They can grade cancers with unprecedented precision, meaning that patients could one day see individually tailored drug regimens,...
Selected Suppliers (63K)