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

[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 needed for accurately delivering...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

Enables the rapid and accurate synthesis and immobilization of large numbers of polymers and compounds, allowing for parallel reactions and efficient screening, thereby overcoming the limitations of existing technologies in terms of density and accessibility of reaction sites.

Problems solved by technology

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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