Highly parallel dispensing of chemical and biological reagents

We present a technology for the highly parallel dispensing of a multitude of reagents. It allows one to dispense up to 96 different reagents simultaneously in a fixed array, in a volume range of 100 pL up to several nL. The pitch of the dispensed droplets can be as small as 500 mum. All channels are fired simultaneously, giving an unprecedented throughput. The system was originally developed for the high-throughput fabrication of microarrays, but can easily be adopted for other applications such as highly parallel filling of nanotiterplates. Based on our standard configuration we achieved droplets with 125-mum in-flight diameter (1.2 nL) with a CV of <1%.