A novel protein micro stamper with back-filling reservoir for simultaneous immobilization of large protein arrays

This paper proposes a novel stamping system using a back-filling micro-stamp chip with discrete dispensing channels to produce precise and uniform protein microarrays for disease diagnosis or drug screening. Unlike the micro arrayer spotting biosamples in serial, this novel device can simultaneously spot hundreds to thousands of bioreagents into a dense array in one minute. Reservoir filling, solution transportation, micro/nano imprinting, and droplet break-down processes of the micro stamp system employ only surface tension passively by the channel design of the device, thus no actuation means or external energy sources were required to manipulate bioreagents. Both simulation and experiment showed the capability of this system to accurately transfer proteins onto uniform arrays. Experimental results also verified that the spot size and intensity variations of spotted protein arrays were less than 5% across the whole chip with 144 protein spots.