In recent years biomedical science has significantly increased its understanding of human genetics, gene expression regulation and studies of human cancer. The development is linked to the advances made in the electronic industry and information technology, which have been successfully applied to the biological sciences. This has created new technologies and automated methods, such as microarray technology. Microarrays are tiny chips containing tens of thousands of spots of fragments of DNA, each of which corresponds to a single gene. They are used to analyse which genes are active, their level of expression and which variations occur in pathological conditions. This technology allows the monitoring of the whole genome or transcriptome on a single chip and allows the detection of the expression of thousands of genes in a single assay. Terminologies that have been used in the literature to describe this technology include, but not limited to: biochip, DNA chip, DNA microarray, and gene array.
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