Applications of DNA Microarray in Disease Diagnostics

Rapid and accurate diagnosis of diseases is very important for appropriate treatment of patients. Recent advances in molecular-level interaction and detection technologies are upgrading the clinical diagnostics by providing new ways of diagnosis, with higher speed and accuracy. In particular, DNA microarrays can be efficiently used in clinical diagnostics which span from discovery of disease-relevant genes to diagnosis using its biomarkers. Diagnostic DNA microarrays have been used for genotyping and determination of disease-relevant genes or agents causing diseases, mutation analysis, screening of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), detection of chromosome abnormalities, and global determination of posttranslational modification. The performance of DNA-microarray-based diagnosis is continuously improving by the integration of other tools. Thus, DNA microarrays will play a central role in clinical diagnostics and will become a gold standard method for disease diagnosis. In this paper, various applications of DNA microarrays in disease diagnosis are reviewed. Special effort was made to cover the information disclosed in the patents so that recent trends and missing applications can be revealed.