DNA Microarrays: An Overview of Technologies and Applications

The Genome Project and the technological innovations that it spawned have dramatically altered the future course of all biological research. The Genbank database already harbors billions of base pairs of DNA sequences derived from millions of individual sequence entries http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/WEB/Genbank/index.html ). The first complete genomic sequence to be completed was that of Haemophilus influenzae (1 ). Since then, the genomes of more than 30 additional organisms have been completed and made available to the research community http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Entrez/Genome/org.html . Continued improvements in high-throughput DNA sequence technology made it possible to complete 90% of the reference human genome sequence in 2000, several years ahead of schedule. To utilize the enormous potential of genome-wide sequence information will require the development of a battery of new tools for high-throughput and highly parallel molecular analyses and commensurate bioinformatics tools to analyze data sets of unprecedented depth and complexity.