title: Virus diagnostics on microarrays.
abstract: Whereas the majority of microarray applications still deal with expression analysis for gathering information about levels of gene products at certain cell states, other approaches simply ask the question whether particular genes, which are usually indicative for particular microorganisms and pathogens, are present in a sample or not. Investigations that are more detailed try to evaluate the presence of particular subtypes of a given pathogen. The combination of microarray technology and virus diagnostics promises to generate an ideal platform for fast, sensitive, specific, and parallelized virus diagnostics. Performing virus diagnostics on microarrays, however, requires other basic techniques to be optimized. This is necessary in order to obtain unambiguous and reproducible results, which are compatible with the needs for clinical routine. Parameters that have to be considered include supports, coupling chemistry, chemical oligonucleotide synthesis, signal enhancement strategies, and optimal coordination of PCR reactions, hybridizations, and signal detection, as well as interpretation strategies. Finally, considerations should be given to economic aspects, one chip-one patient strategies and low integrated arrays as a custom-tailored way to fast and accurate diagnostic tools.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Molecular Biotechnology, Beutenbergstrasse 11, D-07745 Jena, Germany.
authors.forename: Hans-Martin
authors.initials: HM
authors.lastname: Striebel
authors.forename: Eckhard
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Birch-Hirschfeld
authors.forename: Renate
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Egerer
authors.forename: Zeno
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Földes-Papp
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D004867:Equipment Design; D015967:Gene Expression Regulation, Viral / Q000235:genetics*; D016679:Genome, Viral; D006801:Humans; D020411:Oligonucleotide Array Sequence Analysis / Q000295:instrumentation* / Q000379:methods* / Q000639:trends; D018139:Simplexvirus / Q000145:classification / Q000235:genetics / Q000302:isolation & purification; D014777:Virus Diseases / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000235:genetics*; D014780:Viruses / Q000145:classification / Q000235:genetics* / Q000302:isolation & purification*