Affymetrix GeneChip® Technology supports
both RNA (Gene Expression) and DNA (Genotyping, Resequencing) analysis.
The high density of GeneChip® arrays, the high reproducibility
and the low amount of biological specimen needed are clear advantages of
GeneChip® Technology over alternative microarray platforms
and have made it the gold standard in this field.
For the production of GeneChip® arrays
a combination of photolithography and combinatorial chemistry is used to
synthesize millions of copies of selected oligonucleotides (25 nucleotides
in final length) base by base in hundreds of thousands of different probe
cells on a glass surface. Probe cells have a size of only 11 µm x 11
µm in the most recent GeneChip® array design.