seminar topic

DNA chips:-

DNA chips also known as micro arrays are very
significant technological development in molecula
biology and are perhaps most efficient tool available
for functional genomics today. An evident from the
name micro array essentially consists of an array
of either Oligonucleotides or cDNA fixed on a
substrate. There has been an explosion of information
in the field of genomics in the last five years.
Genomes of several organisms have been fully
sequenced. The next step necessarily involves
the analysis of comparative expression levels of
various genes and to identify all the possible
variations of sequence present in each of the
gene or in the noncording regulatory regions
obtained from a particular population. Handling
such large volumes of data requires techniques
which necessitate miniaturization and a massive
parallelism. Hence the DNA chip comes in to the picture.
Researchers such as those at the University of
Alaska Fairbanks' (UAF) Institute of Arctic Biology (IAB)
and the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center (ARSC)
seek to understand how organisms deal with the
demands of their natural environment-as shown
by the discovery of many remarkable adaptations
that organisms have acquired living in the extremes
of Alaska. Many of these adaptations have significant
biomedical relevance in areas such as stroke,
cardiovascular disease, and physiological stress.
Somehow, our wild counterparts have adapted to
severe environmental demands over long periods
of time. Simultaneous to this research, scientists
are also investigating the molecular changes that
can be observed in humans as a result of their
environment, such as through smoking or exposure
to contaminants.

This push in research has resulted in the integration
with life science research of approaches from many
fields, including engineering, physics, mathematics,
and computer science. One of the most well-known
results of this is the Human Genome Project.
Through this project, researchers * were able to
design instruments capable of performing many
different types of molecular measurements so
that statistically significant and large scale sampling
of these molecules could be achieved. Now,
biomedical research is producing data that show
researchers that things are not always where they
expected them to be, while at the same time researchers
are at a rapidly expanding phase of discovery
and analysis of large, highly repeatable measurements
of complex molecular systems.

One of the more important and generally applicable
tools that has emerged from this type of research is
called DNA micro arrays, or DNA chip technology
This technology uses the fundamentals of Watson
and Crick base-pairing along with hybridization to

applications of DNA micro arrays to simultaneously
interrogate a large number of genetic loci
(those locations on the DNA molecules that have
differing biological roles). The result of this type
analysis is that experiments that once tool ten
years in thousands of laboratories can now be
with a small number of experiments in just one laboratory.
satya prakash tiwari

b.tech(c.s.e)