The range and scope of nucleic acid-based assays continues to expand in the fields of medicine, forensic, and environmental applications. These nucleic acids based assays are not limited to diagnosis but also have found application in prognosis and treatment of innumerable human diseases.

The new wave of microanalytical devices (microchips, with nanoliter to microliter internal volumes), parallel simultaneous test arrays, and the desire to produce hand-held sensors present new challenges and requirements for nucleic acid detection methods.The ultimate goal would be to include such properties as stability, sensitivity of detection, speed and convenience of detection, and the overall cost of detection reagents, and detection system.Finally, while there is a general acceptance of the benefits of genomics for the acceleration of DNA typing and development in the academia and industry, the impact of pharmacogenomics is not yet fully realized and therefore not broadly embraced. The pharmacogenomics challenge is to comprehensively identify the genes and functional polymorphisms associated with the variability in drug response using DNA based technologies.

This presentation will indicate advances and importance of DNA typing technologies in genetics and functional genomics in relation to human diseases and for a better understanding of the pharmaco-logy of drugs in preclinical and clinical evaluation.