SurePrint technology: Custom commercial microarrays are manufactured using a 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. Standard phosphoramidite chemistry used in the reactions allows for very high coupling efficiencies to be maintained at each step in the synthesis of the full-length oligonucleotide. Precise quantities are reproducibly deposited “on the fly” and is achieved without stopping, to make contact with the slide surface and without introducing surface-contact feature anomalies.
