The power and promise of microarrays are vast. Offering the ability to run tens of thousands of experiments in parallel on a small glass slide, gene chips have transformed functional genomics, whether through expression analysis or genotyping, from fantasy to reality with dizzying speed.
And yet, longstanding doubts persist as to the worth of the torrent of data that microarrays produce. Experiments have proved difficult to reproduce, and the lists of genes found in similar studies often have only limited overlap. Myriad protocols and platforms, and the proliferation of homemade arrays, means that there is no one standardized set of procedures to follow when designing or replicating an experiment. Some analyses have found cross-platform reproducibility to be poor.1
But, microarray technology isn't as flawed as it was feared to be. At least, those are the findings of a trio of papers published in the May issue of Nature Methods,234 which ...
