"The Yu group have created a ‘home-made’ micro-array on a music CD that just needs an ordinary CD player to scan the disk for the results of the binding assay. They did what!?! You heard right – and their system is impressively flexible since interactions involving DNA and protein can both be analysed." - Maxine from Bookmarklet

"The disk can be inserted into a standard CD player to analyse the results! Because music CDs have been designed to play back smoothly even when they get scratched or dirty, the music is encoded in a way that allows error detection and correction. The software analyzing the readout from the disk knows precisely where the errors on the disk lie. Now, normally you don’t care about the errors; you’re only interested in hearing a faithful rendition the toe-tapping tunes of your favourite combo (‘Hold on Tight’ by The Electric Light Orchestra anyone?), but with freely-available software tools, you can access the error information and that is exactly what the Yu group have done." - Maxine