Microarray spotter has a unique replaceable inject print head with over 100 nozzles for excellent uniformity and consistency
Arrayjet, a young company closely linked to the University of Edinburgh, has announced the launch of its Aj100 microarray spotter.
The Aj100 uses a modern, replaceable inkjet print-head with over 100 nozzles to deliver samples to the array surface.
Conventional non-contact printers use between four and eight discrete piezo tips for dispensing.
The Aj100 inkjet print head produces microarrays of very high quality, with excellent morphology, uniformity, consistency and robustness, says ArrayJet.
The extra nozzles also give an additional advantage in that there is redundancy in the print-head - it carries spare capacity on every print run.
Academic and commercial researchers will benefit equally from the careful design and ingenuity of the Aj100, since standard pin-based microarray spotters often produce differentiation in print quality; those producing their own arrays will no longer have quadrants of the chip that have higher densities of macromolecules than others.
The core of Arrayjet's technology is the Connector Block, a proprietary liquid handling device, which will soon enable the management of up to 32 samples, feeding them into separate nozzles in the inkjet print-head simultaneously, without the risk of cross-contamination.
This will provide the user with significant speed advantages over other printers on the market.
The Aj100 combines this with the capacity to handle six microtitre plates (96 or 384-well) and print onto 100 slides without user intervention, though more plates may be added manually during a run, up to 192 in total.
Duncan Hall, director of sales and marketing for Arrayjet, said: "the Aj100 is forwards compatible - all of the planned improvements will be available as upgrades to the existing platform, extending its working life and protecting the investment.
"An incredible amount of thought has gone into the various stages of design and development required to get us to the finished product".
One significant planned upgrade is the addition of a microplate stacker to enhance throughput by summer 2005.
Douglas Roy, a molecular biologist at the University of Edinburgh, and co-founder of Arrayjet with University of Cambridge physicist Howard Manning, and director of the SCGTI Peter Ghazal, added "When we founded Arrayjet in 2000, we planned to develop a new spotter that would increase the flexibility for researchers who want, or need, to print their own high-quality arrays for more consistent data sets".
The technological leap taken by Arrayjet is likened to that from handwritten script with a quill pen to modern desktop inkjet printing, the company says.
Roy continued: "With the advanced technology of the Aj100, you can enhance the quality of your data due to the excellent consistency and minimised array-to-array variation.
"If arrays were absolutely perfect compared to each other then that would translate to a higher quality of data".
