Unlike Santa Clara, Calif.-based Affymetrix, which synthesizes oligonucleotides directly on its biochips using a photolithographic process, Motorola synthesizes its 30-nucleotide oligos offline, tests them by mass spectrometry, deposits them on the array, and then assays them for quality control. The final step in the array production process is the addition of a Flex Chamber™—a disposable hybridization chamber already attached to the slide, which resembles a piece of cellophane with adhesive around the edges. In this case, however, the "cellophane" consists of seven layers of material designed in-house at Motorola. Because the arrays come with the Flex Chamber attached, researchers need not purchase special hybridization chambers; they simply apply their target through the holes at the corners of the Flex Chamber, and then seal them to prevent leakage.
Motorola offers several premade, catalog arrays, as well as a custom array synthesis service. The UniSet™ arrays, useful for expression analysis experiments, contain ...
