Development of DNA chip microarrayer

Abstract

A microarrayer system was developed mainly for manufacturing DNA chips. The 3-axis robot was designed to automatically collect samples from 96- or 384-well microtiter plates using up to 16 simultaneously moving pens and to deposit them on a surface-modified slide glass. This is followed by a wash/dry operation in a clean station. The cycle is repeated with a new set of samples. This system can deposit cDNA or oligonucleotides with spot intervals of 150 mu m and the spot size of 80 mu m, thus allowing a high density DNA chip containing about 5,000 spots per cm(2). The entire procedure is controlled by the Visual C++ program that was written in our laboratory by using a personal computer with Pentium 100 CPU.