Microarrays are slides "printed" with thousands of small spots of biological material, in a mechanism similar to inkjet printing, which allow rapid assaying of many cell phenotypes under different conditions. Traditional DNA-based microarrays are printed with DNA oligonucleotides complimentary to the template strand of the full compliment or a subset of genes from a given organism, which are then UV-crosslinked to the slides. mRNA is isolated from the organism in question under two different conditions (i.e., different developmental stages, growth conditions, genotypes, etc.). …
