Why?
Advantages and Potential
Why Micro-Dispensing matters
Microdispensers transfer picoliter and nanoliter volumes of solvents, solutions, or nanoparticle suspensions onto surfaces or into liquids. Similar to inkjet printers, they are key tools for next-generation laboratories.
Fast, precise, and versatile, some models can even handle aggressive reagents like strong acids or bases, enabling miniaturized liquid handling in applications like biochips and biosensors.
The Advantages
- Digital liquid handling: All volumes are multiples of one.
- Miniaturization: Thousands of experiments run simultaneously.
- Required to produce state-of-the-art biochips.
- Save costs by reducing reagents consumption.
- Homogeneous coatings: Dense layers of small droplets.
- Efficient mixing: Instead of 1 µL at one position, add 20x50 nL at different positions.
Miniaturization: Microdispensing vs. Pipetting
Microdispensing outperforms pipetting below 1 µL, enabling precise placement of diverse samples on areas < 1 mm² and into microchannels as narrow as 200 µm. Ultra-low-volume dispensing is essential for producing advanced biochips and biosensors, supporting efficient miniaturization and integration of complex workflows on a single chip.
The video displays an iONE using a picoliter dispenser to create droplets of about 300 picoliters.
High-density Microarrays - Printing Biomolecules
Many biomolecules, such as specific antibodies, are too costly to use in large quantities. Using only picoliter aliquots overcomes this limitation and enables multiple measurements.
In some cases, precious samples need to be analysed alongside many potential binding partners. Examples of this include high-density peptide arrays for antibody epitope mapping and human protein arrays for disease-specific autoantibody screening in serum or plasma samples.
Microarrays in MTPs – Hundreds of tests per well
Instead of one ELISA per well, miniaturized microarrays allow hundreds - saving time, cost, sample, and space.
A single experiment can now include many more tests, such as subtyping bacterial or viral infections. Also, less sample material is required per test. For example, less blood would be required for diagnostic monitoring.
Spotting into MTPs requires the iONE and its ultra-fast Z-drive technology.