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I am afraid is quite an in-depth subject.

in layman's terms, if you imagine a glass slide with lots of very small dots (500,000 of them). these dots (probes) are complementary DNA, which has been stuck to the slide.

If you then take a sample of mRNA (expressed DNA) from the patient and turn it into DNA (cDNA). If you then put that cDNA on top of the dots on the slide and incubate, if that patients gene is being expressed it will bind to the probes stuck on the glass. This binding to the probe causes fluorescence, which can be detected.

If you compare the expression patterns between a healthly individual and a diseased individual you can try and work out what genes are being expressed differently in that condition (for research purposes). If you already know a certain gene is over expressed in a disease (e.g. BRAC2 in Breast cancer), you can then diagnose the patient.

Likewise you can use microarrays to predict what diseases you may develop in the future - for example you may be found to have a gene found in Alzheimer's for instance.

This is a very very brief introduction to the subject and its very interesting, you may like to try the following link if you'd like some more information on the subject.

http://plasticdog.cheme.columbia.edu/undergraduate_research/projects/sahil_mehta_project/work.htm

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17y ago

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