DNA Microarray, has it lived up to its expectations?
A few years ago it seemed like we were at the beginning of a new era; the era of the microarray. The possibilities seemed spectacular. We could screen all genes in a single experiment.
But what happened to these expectations. There were a few first publications in which microarrays were a novelty. This novelty has now worn off. It is just a tool.
But is this tool as useful as we used to think?
What is your opinion?
A few years ago it seemed like we were at the beginning of a new era; the era of the microarray. The possibilities seemed spectacular. We could screen all genes in a single experiment.
But what happened to these expectations. There were a few first publications in which microarrays were a novelty. This novelty has now worn off. It is just a tool.
But is this tool as useful as we used to think?
What is your opinion?
, forgive the gratuitous plug). No one has been using the technology for generating random hypotheses in our lab (we do all micro-array experiments in the state of Hawaii). Generally it's used to identify up- (and down-) regulation of genes in test vs. control individuals. Sometimes differentially regulated genes are involved in the same metabolic pathways, which is quite interesting. Conservation of genes and gene linkage have been found across great evoultionary distances in eukaryotes (recent Nature paper). A recent Science paper also examined the utility of micro-array experiments with mixed conclusions.