PUBLICATIONS - New from Clinica Reports - Biochips and Microarrays
This article was originally published in Clinica
Executive Summary
Executive Summary The world of biochips and microarrays is a world of laboratories in miniature. Given the technology, it makes sense to shrink the laboratory onto a small glass or nylon slide. Most of the biological reactions we need to examine occur at the sub-cellular level and to confront them at that scale offers practical advantages - including speed and the ability to condense a whole battery of assays or tests into a space measuring just a few millimetres square. Indeed, now that we are receiving the structure of the whole human genome, there is a pressing need for miniaturisation of test systems. To convert the mass of data thus revealed into tests of practical use would be extremely clumsy if we were still relying on laboratory procedures of 'conventional' scale.