The votes are in and it would seem that the research community hasn't quite made up its mind about what to do with microarrays just yet.
In a recent poll conducted by the RNA-Seq Blog, about half of 175 total respondents, or 88 voters, declared that microarrays are here to stay, while the remaining 50 percent, or 87 voters, believe that its time is over.
Earlier this year, Daily Scan's sister publication, BioArray News, reported that the array market has been feeling pressure for some time from the growing availability of increasingly affordable next-generation sequencing-based applications and also weaker government research spending where proposals that explicitly mention a desire to use sequencing are viewed as more likely to secure funding than those that rely on arrays.
But the results of this poll indicate that microarrays "may be here to stay," the RNA-Seq Blog says.
That suggestion is supported by recent comments from Seth Crosby, director of Genome Technology Access Center at Washington University's School of Medicine, who told BioArray News that he continues to see a demand for arrays and predicted that the technology will hold its own for a few more years even though it will likely lose some ground to sequencing technologies.