Both catalog and custom microarrays are manufactured using a proprietary non-contact industrial inkjet printing process, in which oligo monomers are deposited uniformly onto specially-prepared glass slides. This in situ synthesis process prints 60-mer length oligonucleotide probes, base-by-base, from digital sequence files. The precise inkjet process enables the delivery of extremely small, accurate volumes (picoliters) of the chemicals to be spotted.
This animation shows the process in action.
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