A novel strategy for in situ maskless synthesis of biochips: Self-driving micro-fluid porous type printing (SMPTP)

A novel maskless technique, self-driving micro-fluid porous type printing (SMPTP), was reported to in situ synthesize oligonucleotide arrays on glass slide, which has the merits of low cost, high quality and simple craft. In SMPTP for fabricating gene-chips, porous fiber tubes with a number of nanometric or micron channels functioned as “active letters” and were assembled in designed patterns, which are identical to the distribution of monomers in each layer of the array, and four patterns were needed for each layer. By means of capillarity, the synthesis solution was automatically taken into porous tubes assembled in a printing plate and reached the surface. An oligonucleotide array of 160 features with four different 15-mer probes was in situ synthesized using this technique. The four specific oligonucleotide probes, including the matched and the mismatched by the fluorescent target sequence, gave obviously different hybridization fluorescent signals.