1
Department of Pathology, Stanford University School of Medicine, CCSR Building, Room 3245A, 269 Campus Drive, Stanford, California 94305-5176, USA jpollack1@stanford.edu
2
Institute for Cellular and Molecular Biology and Section of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology, University of Texas at Austin, 1 University Station A4800, Austin, Texas 78712-0159, USA vishy@mail.utexas.edu
The genome of an organism is a dynamic physical entity, comprising genomic DNA bound to many different proteins and organized into chromosomes. A thorough characterization of the physical genome is relevant to our understanding of processes such as the regulation of gene expression, DNA replication and repair, recombination, chromosome segregation, epigenetic inheritance and genomic instability. Methods based on microarrays are beginning to provide a detailed picture of this physical genome, and they complement the genome-wide studies of mRNA expression profiling that have previously been so successful.
