Non-contact Technology Comes Good

Arrayjet, a young company closely linked to the University of Edinburgh, announced the launch of its Aj100 Microarray Spotter. The Aj100 uses a modern, replaceable inkjet print-head with over 100 nozzles to deliver samples to the array surface. Conventional non-contact printers use between four and eight discrete piezo tips for dispensing. The Aj100 inkjet print head produces microarrays of very high quality, with excellent morphology, uniformity, consistency and robustness. The extra nozzles also give an additional advantage in that there is redundancy in the print-head – it carries spare capacity on every print run. Academic and commercial researchers will benefit equally from the careful design and ingenuity of the Aj100, since standard pin-based microarray spotters often produce differentiation in print quality; those producing their own arrays will no longer have quadrants of the chip that have higher densities of macromolecules than others.