ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) array technique, including design and realisation, but also to discuss the different strategies in which it is used to address biological questions. It presents a bibliography of different uses of microarrays in the plant kingdom. A major proportion of high scale gene expression measurement experiments are nowadays conduced in an indirect mode, for example, involving the recognition of the target by a labelled probe. DNA and more generally nucleic acid can pair complementary strands via non-covalent binding in a duplex; this fundamental characteristic is used in all DNA array techniques to target the transcripts of interest. The initial step in creating Macro- and Microarrays is the selection of the probe library to be bound on the slide. Microarray design is usually governed by the aim of the experiment and instantly raises the question of the total probe size. Determination of differentially expressed genes is often a prerequisite to diagnostic analysis.
