Biochip

Biochip

The development of biochips is a major thrust of the rapidly growing biotechnology industry, which encompasses a very diverse range of research efforts including genomics, proteomics, and pharmaceuticals, among other activities. Advances in these areas are giving scientists new methods for unraveling the complex biochemical processes occurring inside cells, with the larger goal of understanding and treating human diseases. At the same time, the semiconductor industry has been steadily perfecting the science of microminiaturization. The merging of these two fields in recent years has enabled biotechnologists to begin packing their traditionally bulky sensing tools into smaller and smaller spaces, onto so-called biochips. These chips are essentially miniaturized laboratories that can perform hundreds or thousands of simultaneous biochemical reactions. Biochips enable researchers to quickly screen large numbers of biological analytes for a variety of purposes, from disease diagnosis to detection of bioterrorism agents.

A biochip is a collection of miniaturized test sites (microarrays) arranged on a solid substrate that permits many tests to be performed at the same time in order to achieve higher output and speed. Biochips can also be used to perform techniques such as electrophoresis or PCR using microfluidics technology (Fan, 2009; Cady, 2009).

== History ==oxygen electrode, thereby relating oxygen levels to glucose concentration. This and similar biosensors became known as enzyme electrodes, and are still in use today.

In 1953, Watson and Crick announced their discovery of the now familiar double helix structure of DNA molecules and set the stage for genetics research that continues to the present day (Nelson, 2000). The development of sequencing techniques in 1977 by Gilbert (Maxam, 1977) and Sanger (Sanger, 1977) (working separately) enabled researchers to directly read the genetic codes that provide instructions for protein synthesis. This research showed how hybridization of complementary single oligonucleotide strands could be used as a basis for DNA sensing. Two additional developments enabled the technology used in modern DNA-based biosensors. First, in 1983 Kary Mullis invented the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique (Nelson, 2000), a method for amplifying DNA concentrations. This discovery made possible the detection of extremely small quantities of DNA in samples. Second, in 1986 Hood and coworkers devised a method to label DNA molecules with fluorescent tags instead of radiolabels (Smith, 1986), thus enabling hybridization experiments to be observed optically.