THE SURFACE SCIENCE OF MICROARRAY GENERATION - A CRITICAL INVENTORY.

Abstract

Microarrays are powerful tools in biomedical research and have become indispen-sable for high-throughput multiplex analysis, especially for DNA and protein analy-sis. The basis for all microarray processing and fabrication is surface modification of a chip substrate and many different strategies to couple probe molecules to such substrates have been developed. We present here a critical assessment of typical biochip generation processes from a surface science point of view. While great progress has been made from a molecular biology point of view on the develop-ment of qualitative assays and impressive results have been obtained on the detec-tion of rather low concentrations of DNA or proteins, quantitative chip-based as-says are still comparably rare. We argue that lack of stable and reliable deposition chemistries has led in many cases to suboptimal quantitative reproducibility, im-peded further progress in microarray development and prevented a more significant penetration of microarray technology into the diagnostic market. We suggest that surface-attached hydrogel networks might be a promising strategy to achieve highly sensitive and quantitatively reproducible microarrays.