Pins are micromachined in parallel from single crystal silicon wafers using semiconductor microfabrication techniques instead of the techniques used to prepare steel pins
Parallel Synthesis Technologies (PSTI) announces the introduction of its new silicon microarray microcontact printing technology for spotting DNA and protein microarrays.
The pins are micromachined in parallel from single crystal silicon wafers using semiconductor microfabrication techniques instead of the machine shop techniques used to prepare the currently used steel pins.
PSTI said that the inherent precision of the micromachining process, the advantages of the highly parallel fabrication of the pins and the unique physical properties of single crystal silicon allow them to fabricate printing tools that substantially outperform the current technology at a fraction of the cost. Unique features of the pins, such as the ability to spot directly from a 1536 source plate, the capability to print with 192 pins at once, the ability to spot over 400 spots per fill, lower uptake volume (100nl per fill), the selection of print tip sizes from 50x50 to 200x200 microns to print spot sizes ranging from 75um to 250um in diameter, the spot to spot uniformity, very low wear of the hard silicon print tips and tight control of the uptake and print volumes are attributes not currently available with the current steel pins.
The so called 'prespotting phenomena' where large, unusable spots are printed after pin filling, has been eliminated by 3D sculpting of the tip.
The capability of micromachining to carefully control the reservoir and print tip shapes allows essentially 100% of the sample taken up to be printed.
Other materials such as proteins, lipids and whole cell lysates have also been successfully printed.
Finally, since the holder/collimator is also micromachined silicon, it is expected that a substantial diminution in spot size with a concomitant increase in array density is possible well into the future.
The ability to fabricate hundreds of pins in parallel allows users to enjoy a substantial price reduction over the current technology with the silicon pins selling at about 20% of the comparably performing steel pins.
