This will allow physicians to determine what genes might cause a particular disease and will provide pharmacologists with a basis for designing drugs for treatment. Argonne National Laboratory photo by Stan Niehoff. Biochips can identify which genes in a cell are active at any given time and how they respond to changes. This capability allows physicians to determine what genes might be the cause of a particular disease and provides pharmacologists with a basis for designing drugs for treatment.
Biochips are essentially biochemistry laboratories in miniature.
By attaching antibodies instead of nucleic acids to the biochips, hundreds of immunoassays on a single sample might be performed. Inserting appropriate enzymes or the products of enzyme activity onto biochips would allow their use in environmental chemistry and medical forensics. Biological information is encoded in DNA, the building block in human genes that makes each of us unique. By combining biochips with robots and computers, biologists can detect one genetic variation among three billion DNA bases in minutes. Thousands of biochemical tests that now take days can be performed in less than an hour.