Charting the Microarray Revolution

In the early 1990s, my colleagues and I at Stanford University began tinkering with an interesting weed, the small flowering mustard plant, Arabidopsis thaliana. We set out to study genes involved in controlling the growth and appearance of this lauded model organism, and using molecular cloning and transgenics, we identified a novel family of plant homeobox genes.

This experiment proved valuable in a number of respects. First, we showed we could hasten or slow the rate of plant development by altering the expression of a single gene.¹ But also, it prompted us to pursue an interesting "side project" aimed at developing the DNA microarray, a prospective new means of monitoring plant gene expression with high precision.

The publication of our article in 1995 generated considerable interest (racking up nearly 2,200 citations; see http://garfield.library.upenn.edu/histcomp/index-Microarray.html) because it demonstrated for the first time that the expression of many genes could be monitored in ...