Research and development of biochip technologies in Taiwan

摘要

Recent advancements in several genome-sequencing projects have stimulated an enormous interest in microarray DNA chip technology, especially in biomedical sciences and pharmaceutical industires. The DNA chips facilitated the miniaturization of conventional nucleic acid hybridizations, by either robotically spotting thousands of library cDNAs or in situ synthesis of high-density oligonucleotides onto solid supports. These innovations have found a wide range of applications in molecular biology, especially in studying gene expression and discovering new genes from the global view of genomic analysis. The research and development of this powerful tool has also received great attentions in Taiwan. In this paper, we report the current progresses of our DNA chip project, along with the current status of other biochip projects in Taiwan, such as protein chip, PCR chip, electrophoresis chip, olfactory chip, etc. The new development of biochip technologies integrates the biotechnology with the semiconductor processing, the micro-electro-mechanical, optoectronic, and digital signal processing technologies. Most of these biochip technologies utilize optical detection methods for data acquisition and analysis. The strengths and advantages of different approaches are compared and discussed in this report.