| Stephen P.A. Fodor |
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[Slide 1]
It is a pleasure to be here today and to win this prestigious award from the Takeda Foundation. I want to especially express my gratitude to Dr. Takeda and to the Takeda Foundation. It is also a great pleasure to share this award with Dr. Pat Brown for his contributions to the DNA array field.
[Slide 2]
I would like to start the discussion today by talking about the objective of this research, which is to understand human diversity and consequently, health and disease.
[Slide 3]
We have recently seen a significant scientific advance with the completion of the human genome. It is now time to think about how to apply that knowledge to human health.
[Slide 4]
In order to do that, we must understand the DNA sequence, the production of RNA or transcripts from the DNA, and ultimately the effect of sequence variation and transcription on cellular activity.
[Slide 5]
Of course, this is made more difficult by the fact that the genome is complex. The genome is comprised of more than three billion base pairs and contains some thirty to forty thousand genes.
[Slide 6]
In order to address this complexity, it is important to develop large-scale information processing tools that can analyze both the variation and the function of the entire human genome. We can think of the DNA microarray as a DNA information storage device, essentially a CD-ROM of the human genome.
[Slide 7]
Like most information storage devices, it requires a massively parallel technology. One method to make DNA microarrays was first described by our group in a 1991 Science article.
[Slide 8]
In developing this method, we borrowed heavily from semi-conductor technology to make DNA arrays on whole wafers. Each wafer consists of multiple DNA microarrays, which are in turn composed of 500,000 different features that can contain millions of different DNA sequences. In this process, we synthesize single stranded DNA directly on the array. The sample, which can be blood or biopsy tissue, is then washed over the array. The sequences contained in the sample will bind to the complementary sequences built on the array. The signal resulting from this hybridization is then read by a laser scanner and analyzed by software.
[Slide 9]
This process has been industrialized and is now very high throughput.
[Slide 10]
We have implemented techniques, again borrowed heavily from the semi-conductor industry, to manufacture the wafer substrate which is diced to make the DNA chips.
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