The technical platforms to conduct ChIP-on-chip experiments are DNA microarrays, or "chips". They can be classified and distinguished according to various characteristics:
Probe type: DNA arrays can comprise either mechanically spotted cDNAs or PCR-products, mechanically spotted oligonucleotides, or oligonucleotides that are synthesized in situ. The early versions of microarrays were designed to detect RNAs from expressed genomic regions (open reading frames aka ORFs). Although such arrays are perfectly suited to study gene expression profiles, they have limited importance in ChIP experiments since most "interesting" proteins with respect to this technique bind in intergenic regions. Nowadays, even custom-made arrays can be designed and fine-tuned to match the requirements of an experiment. Also, any sequence of nucleotides can be synthesized to cover genic as well as intergenic regions.
Probe size: Early version of cDNA arrays had a probe length of about 200bp. Latest array versions use oligos as short as 70- (Microarrays, Inc.) to 25-mers (Affymetrix). (Feb 2007)
Probe composition: There are tiled and non-tiled DNA arrays. Non-tiled arrays use probes selected according to non-spatial criteria, i.e., the DNA sequences used as probes have no fixed distances in the genome. Tiled arrays, however, select a genomic region (or even a whole genome) and divide it into equal chunks. Such a region is called tiled path. The average distance between each pair of neighboring chunks (measured from the center of each chunk) gives the resolution of the tiled path. A path can be overlapping, end-to-end or spaced.
Array size: The first microarrays used for ChIP-on-Chip contained about 13,000 spotted DNA segments representing all ORFs and intergenic regions from the yeast genome. Nowadays, Affymetrix offers whole-genome tiled yeast arrays with a resolution of 5bp (all in all 3.2 million probes). Tiled arrays for the human genome become more and more powerful, too. Just to name one example, Affymetrix offers a set of seven arrays with about 90 million probes, spanning the complete non-repetitive part of the human genome with about 35bp spacing. (Feb 2007)
Besides the actual microarray, other hard- and software equipment is necessary to run ChIP-on-chip experiments. It is generally the case that one companys microarrays can not be analyzed by another companys processing hardware. Hence, buying an array requires also buying the associated workflow equipment. The most important elements are, among others, hybridization ovens, chip scanners, and software packages for subsequent numerical analysis of the raw data.