DNA deposition through laser induced forward transfer

Laser induced forward transfer (LIFT) is a laser direct write technique that appears to be specially adequate for the production of biosensors, since it permits to deposit patterns of biomolecules with high spatial resolution. In the LIFT technique, a laser pulse is focused on a thin film of the material to be transferred through a transparent support, and under the action of the laser pulse, a small fraction of the film is transferred to a receptor substrate that is placed parallel to the film-support system. In the case of biomolecules transfer, the thin film consists in a liquid solution containing the biomolecules. In this work, microarrays of two different cDNAs have been both spotted by LIFT and pin microspotting onto a poly-l-lysine treated glass slide. Once transferred, all the microarrays have been submitted to hybridization with the complementary strands of the spotted cDNAs, each one tagged with a different fluorochrome. Comparative fluorescence scanner analyses have revealed that the microarrays transferred through LIFT are equivalent to those transferred through pin microspotting in terms of signal intensity and gene discrimination capacity, and that the action of the laser pulse does not result in significant damage of the transferred DNA.