Guided deposition in spatial arrays

Abstract

An apparatus and method is provided for preparing and using a very large and diverse array of compounds on a substrate having rapidly accessible locations. The substrate contains cells in which the compounds of the array are located. Surrounding the cells is a non-wetable surface that prevents the solution in one cell from moving to adjacent cells. The compounds are delivered to the individual cells of the array by a micropipette attached to an X-Y translation stage.

Description

BACKGROUND OF TE INVENTION[0001] The present invention lies in the field of methods and apparatus for preparing large arrays of polymers, receptors, and other compounds. More particularly, it lies in the fields of automated methods for preparing diverse arrays of polymers and of techniques for directing specified materials to predefined locations on a substrate.[0002] Very diverse collections of compounds are often desired in research and other applications. Microtiter plates conventionally contain wells for testing as many as 96 different compounds. For many applications, 96 represents an unacceptably small number of samples. Further, when the compounds of interest are rare or valuable, the test samples must be minuscule. Unfortunately, signals from such small samples can be lost or diluted in the relatively large volume wells of a conventional microtiter plate. If the wells were made smaller and placed in higher densities on microtiter plates, suitable methods would still be neede...

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Problems solved by technology

Further, when the compounds of interest are rare or valuable, the test samples must be minuscule.

Unfortunately, signals from such small samples can be lost or diluted in the relatively large volume wells of a conventional microtiter plate.

The Geysen et al. method is limited in the number of sequences that can be synthesized in a reasonable amount of time.

Even if the large number of desired compounds could be produced quickly, they would not be readily accessible for further study.

The 96 pin arrays of Geysen et al. would occupy far too much space to rapidly screen thousands of candidate polymers.

Unfortunately, the compounds of these libraries are not readily accessible for systematic study.

The high reactivity of the nitrene intermediate, however, results in both low coupling efficiencies and many potentially unwanted reactions through nonspecific reactions.

If a very large group of compounds is used to form a diverse array, the number of individual locations on the array can be enormous.

Further, once the array is produced, it can become quite difficult to locate specific members of the array for further processing or study.

However, neither the method described in the Wong et al. reference nor the method described in the Southern application concerns very large arrays of polymers.

Further, the methods described in these two references would be unacceptably slow in accessing specific elements of a large array.

In alternative embodiments, the polymers or other compounds of the array are delivered to the cells as complete species and, thus, the above polymer synthesis steps become unnecessary.

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