DNA microarrays in clinical practice: past, present, and future

Gene expression is a central concept in molecular biology and forms part of our knowledge of the role of genes in human diseases. Genome-wide monitoring of gene expression using DNA microarrays (allowing the simultaneous assessment of the transcription of tens of thousands of genes, and of their relative expression between normal cells and pathological cells) represents one of the latest breakthroughs in experimental molecular biology and provides unprecedented opportunity to explore the biological processes underlying human diseases by providing a comprehensive survey of a cell's transcriptional landscape. This revolutionary technology ultimately leads to the discovery of new biomarkers for disease diagnosis and prognosis prediction, and of new therapeutic tools. This paper provides an overview of microarray technology and describes some of its recent applications in medicine.