ABSTRACT
This tutorial review provides an outlook on contact-based fabrication methods suitable for biomolecular platforms. Contact-based methods have emerged in response to serial and expensive fabrication techniques that built devices in a serial way, typically point by point or region by region. The review surveys the biological applications of microcontact printing and affinity contact printing. There is a special focus on DNA printing methods harnessing the supramolecular interactions between two complementary DNA strands.
Subject(s)
Microtechnology/methods , Animals , Humans , Ink , Oligonucleotide Array Sequence Analysis , PrintingABSTRACT
In recent years, a large number of devices based on organic and biological materials have been developed. To scale-up the production of these systems to industrially acceptable standards, there is a need to develop soft-material stamping approaches with the needed resolution, complexity, and versatility. We have recently developed a DNA-based stamping method (supramolecular nano-stamping, SuNS) that has superior resolution and can print multiple molecules at the same time. A similar technique was independently developed by Crooks and co-workers. Here we show that SuNS can be used to efficiently print DNA features on a polymeric substrate (poly(methyl methacrylate), PMMA) with a 40 nm point resolution and a coverage that exceeds 100 mum2. The stamped PMMA substrate was also used as a master to print on a gold substrate. With PMMA being optically clear and electrically insulating, future applications of SuNS to print DNA micro- and nanoarrays are envisioned.
