Microarrays

Introduction

Microarray is a hybridization of a nucleic acid sample (target) to a very large set of oligonucleotide probes, which are attached to a solid support, to determine sequence or to detect variations in a gene sequence or expression or for gene mapping (MeSH).

Several competing technologies for microarray probe implementation have emerged. Affymetrix pioneered this field with by using in situ synthesized oligonucleotides as probes and by designing microarrays in silico, thereby obviating the need for the management of clone libraries.

Microarray technology has two major applications: gene expression analysis and genetic variation analysis.

Two-color microarray principle

Probe

Resources