Development of a Microarrayer for DNA Chips

Microarrayer is used to make DNA chip and microarray that contain hundreds to thousands of immobilized DNA probes on surface of a microscope slide. This paper shows the develop-ment results for a printing type of microarrayer. It realizes a typical, low-cost and efficient microarrayer for generating low density micro array. The microarrayer is developed by using a prependicular type robot with three axes. It is composed of a computer-controlled three-axes robot and a pen tip assembly. The key component of the arrayer is the print-head containing the tips to immobilize cDNA, genomic DNA or similar biological material on glass surface. The robot is designed to automatically collect probes from two 96-well plates with up to 12 pens at the same time. To prove the performance of the developed microarrayer, we use the general water types of inks such as black, blue and red. The inks are distributed at proper positions of 96 well plates and the three color inks are immobilized on the slide glass under the operation procedure. As the result of the test, we can see that it has sufficient performance for the production of low integrated DNA chip consisted of 96 spots within $1cm^2$ area.