Microarray

It is a two-dimensional array on a solid substrate—usually a glass slide or silicon thin-film cell—that assays (tests) large amounts of biological material using high-throughput screening miniaturized, multiplexed and parallel processing and detection methods.

[3][4][5] The "gene chip" industry started to grow significantly after the 1995 Science Magazine article by the Ron Davis and Pat Brown labs at Stanford University.

The fabrication of the microarray requires both biological and physical information, including sample libraries, printers, and slide substrates.

The basic principle of the microarray is the printing of small stains of solutions containing different species of the probe on a slide several thousand times.

Early microarrays were directly printed onto the surface by using printer pins which deposit the samples in a user-defined pattern on the slide.

Ongoing efforts to advance microarray technology aim to create uniform, dense arrays while reducing the necessary volume of solution and minimizing contamination or damage.

Modern approaches do not include just DNA as a sample anymore, but also proteins, antibodies, antigens, glycans, cell lysates and other small molecules.

The most widely used and researched method remains Photolithography, in which photolithographic masks are used to target specific nucleotides to the surface.

With this method high-quality custom arrays can be produced with a very high density of DNA features by using a compact device with few moving parts.