Custom arrays

In a classical microarray experiment, probes are immobilised at the surface of a glass slide. A sample incubated on the slide interacts with probe molecules that can be detected by analysis of the fluorescence. The advantage of the method is the large number of probes (tens to thousends) that can be analysed in parallel. Developed in the early 1990ies, the first commercial application of microarray technology was the analysis of gene expression that was conducted with (25 nt) oligonucleotide chips covering the full transcript of the human genom (GeneChip, Affymetrix).
Over the last 20 years, protocols were developed for all kind of biological molecules of interest including DNA (cDNA, oligonucleotides, RNA), proteins, peptides, antibodies, carbohydrates, lipopolysaccharides, and others (cells, cell lysates, etc). In a large number of project, we gathered experience with all these types of microarrays including the analysis of patient samples derived from serum and breast milk, partly at the single-molecule level.