New chips for molecular biology and diagnostics.

The DNA chips are arrays of DNA probes immobilized on solid support for simultaneous identification of many target DNA sequences. DNA chips applied to diagnosis aims to detect genomic DNA or RNA after PCR amplification. This review provides an overview of DNA chip technology, focusing on diagnostic applications. A comparison between high density and low density microarrays is given showing that low density chips are more suitable for routine applications due to their simplicity, good reproducibility, easy data management and low cost.