The Human Genome Project

Different Technologies to Produce Microarrays

March 2009

Well, there are various technologies that can be used to produce tiny microarrays and a microarray is just a small matrix upon which one generates probes to look for the measurement of the transcript from the various genes and three different technologies that are currently in use. The first one was called photolithography; this was based on the same technology that’s used in producing computer chips but instead of actually etching silicone circuits on a micro-circuit what you use instead is light and synthesis of oligonucleotides and Affymetrix utilized this to synthesize millions of oligonucleotides which were 25 nucleotides long which could hybridize to individual transcripts. A second technology is laser jet printers and this was utilized by Agilent; Agilent was a company that came out of Hewlett-Packard and they used the Hewlett-Packard laser jet printers which normally contain four different colored dyes. But if those dyes were replaced instead with a solution of A, a solution of C, a solution of G, or a solution of T, then one can actually synthesize up to 2 million oligonucleotides that are considerably longer, between 100 and 200 nucleotides in length. The third process is that same technology that is used in some rear projections televisions and that’s called digital light processors. A digital light processor is a tiny control area that has over one million tiny mirrors on it. These mirrors can be tuned to whatever angle you want and use digital light processors instead of making beautiful pictures on a large screen, high definition TV set to actually synthesize oligos too. And the company Nimblegen has utilized this to synthesize up to 2 million 100-200 mers. So with either of these technologies you’ve produced a tiny little array and this array can then be hybridized with the samples that you want.

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