title: A glance at DNA microarray technology and applications.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Because of huge impacts of "OMICS" technologies in life sciences, many researchers aim to implement such high throughput approach to address cellular and/or molecular functions in response to any influential intervention in genomics, proteomics, or metabolomics levels. However, in many cases, use of such technologies often encounters some cybernetic difficulties in terms of knowledge extraction from a bunch of data using related softwares. In fact, there is little guidance upon data mining for novices. The main goal of this article is to provide a brief review on different steps of microarray data handling and mining for novices and at last to introduce different PC and/or web-based softwares that can be used in preprocessing and/or data mining of microarray data.
  
  
  METHODS
  To pursue such aim, recently published papers and microarray softwares were reviewed.
  
  
  RESULTS
  It was found that defining the true place of the genes in cell networks is the main phase in our understanding of programming and functioning of living cells. This can be obtained with global/selected gene expression profiling.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Studying the regulation patterns of genes in groups, using clustering and classification methods helps us understand different pathways in the cell, their functions, regulations and the way one component in the system affects the other one. These networks can act as starting points for data mining and hypothesis generation, helping us reverse engineer.
authors.affiliation: Research Center for Pharmaceutical Nanotechnology, Faculty of Pharmacy, Tabriz University of Medical Sciences, Tabriz, Iran.
authors.forename: Amir Ata
authors.initials: AA
authors.lastname: Saei
authors.forename: Yadollah
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Omidi
keywords: Data Mining; Gene Expression Profiling; Microarray; Omics