Cheap DNA arrays—it's not all smoke and mirrors

Recently, moviegoers in Los Angeles were able to see the latest Star Wars film in a theater equipped with a digital projector. How many in the audience would have imagined that the same technology that brought them images of intergalactic mayhem was also helping to bring down the cost of basic biological research? In this issue, a group of electrical engineers and molecular biologists from the University of Wisconsin present the latest example of how advances in electronics are driving biology forward. The biology comes from synthetic DNA arrays, which are changing the way many biologists are doing business, and the electronics come from the lucrative field of projecting TV images onto larger and larger walls with increasing resolution.