It seems like one of those fated celebrity pairings: the still-simmering microarray meets RNAi, the new darling of functional genomics, and the RNAi microarray is born. But the reality is still in the experimental stages, and it’s not yet clear how this marriage will turn out.

RNAi, or RNA interference, involves transfecting a cell with a double-stranded sequence of RNA, triggering a process that silences expression of corresponding genes in the cell. RNAi works one gene and one cell at a time, but RNAi microarrays promise to make these assays high-throughput.