The identification of a large number of disease genes in recent years has led to a considerable improvement in clinical diagnostic procedures, therapeutic interventions, and prognostic projections and provided carrier or presymptomatic testing to family members of affected individuals. Because the number of gene alterations known to be linked to genetic disorders has risen dramatically over the last decade, the availability of technically simple, cost-effective, and reliable methods to detect changes in the nucleotide sequence has become increasingly important. Although we have recently seen a considerable improvement in our ability to detect DNA alterations, costly mutation analysis using nucleotide sequencing has driven a search for less expensive scanning methods.
