Interviewee: Stephen Fodor. Stephen Fodor continues his discussion of the experiments that laid the groundwork for GeneChipâ„¢ technology. (DNAi Location: Applications > Genes and medicine > Genetic profiling > Stephen Fodor > How the chip was developed-Part II)

Another very important area that needed to be worked out was the combinatorics. Of course if you're going to be making an array with five hundred thousand or with a million different features on it, with a different strand of DNA in each spot, you can't afford from a manufacturing way to use five hundred thousand or a million steps to do this. And so we came up with some very elegant combinatorial chemistry techniques that allows us to actually make many, many compounds in very, very few chemical steps. And so it was really this union of photolithography, synthetic chemistry, as well as the idea of how life uses combinatorial building blocks to build diversity, that we used in order to build the so-called DNA chip.

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