Arrayjet Sprints into benchtop microarray production

Following on from the successful Marathon and Super-Marathon (formerly known as AJ100 and AJ120 respectively) inkjet spotters, Arrayjet has listened to its customers and developed a more compact, R&D focussed machine.

The company unveiled the new instrument at last week's Advanced Microarray Technology (AMT) conference held at the Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Arrayjet also announced an exclusive distribution deal for the US market with Salt Lake City-based BioMicro Systems that will allow clients in the US easier access to the company's offerings.

BioMicro focus on providing biological research products based on microfluidic and microarray technologies to the life science community.

The Sprint uses the same technology as the previous releases, bundled into a lower throughput model that can easily fit onto a laboratory bench.

"We use non-contact printing so we never actually come into contact with the surface we're printing on - and that's very important for two reasons: one is that the surfaces that are coming along are very sensitive and the second is that we can print very, very quickly in a high throughput manner," said Graham Miller, Arrayjet's CEO.

He continued by discussing some of the new, emerging application areas such as the use of DNA chips in research and diagnostics, protein microarrays and printing onto unique surfaces such as CMOS chips.

The printing of proteins onto 3D porous substrates, such as 3D gel surfaces, was highlighted as one of the areas currently of interest.

Researchers from the ARK-Genomics centre at the Roslin Institute in Scotland recently purchased a Super-Marathon to avoid the problems they were encountering using pin microarrayers.

Researchers from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and the German Cancer Research Centre presented results at the conference using the super-Marathon to print protein and antibody arrays on nitrocellulose coated slides such as Thermo Fisher Scientific's PATH and Whatman's FAST slides.

Crucially, the researchers found that antibodies and cell lysates retained their biological activity after being immobilised on the slides making the technique ideal for preparing arrays for basic protein-protein interaction research as well as drug discovery and clinical diagnostic applications.

Researchers from Invitrogen presented favourable results comparing the inkjet printing technology to split pin printing of proteins from Invitrogen's ProtoArray.

The inkjet spots showed better spot morphology as well as reduced diameter variance and less intra-slide concentration variation.

"As protein microarrays move from research into diagnostics, Arrayjet is well-placed to work with the scientists and organisations leading this development," said Miller.

Because the height of the printing stage is adjustable, the Sprint can be used to print on a variety of objects - not just slides including CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor) chips.

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh have been studying the immobilisation of biomolecules on CMOS chips to try to develop the next-generation of microarray devices.

These would avoid the bulky optical sensors currently used in favour of microelectronic detection methods that would lend themselves to the device miniaturisation that would be particularly useful in clinical diagnostic point of care applications.