Chemical microarrays for studying protein-ligand interactions

2 Chemical microarrays for studying protein-ligand interactions 

There are two ways to generate a collection of ligand molecules for immobilization on surfaces chemical library synthesis on micro- or macrobeads and diversity-oriented parallel synthesis of tethered unique compounds (Darvas et al., 2004). 

After completing the s5mthesis, the beads were separated and distributed by using a bead-arrayer in a 384-well format where one bead is distributed to one well. Then, compounds reflecting the one-bead, one-compound 

On-chip synthesis provides a further improvement of efficiency, but has practical limitations in terms of flexibility and the quality of the cm the spot synthesized compounds. Moreover, the homogeneity and the quality of these microarrays are difficult to control. Chemical libraries, applying compoimds with similar fimctional groups and reactivity (like in the case of amino acids), were successfully used in making macroarrays on cellulose membranes using the SPOT synthesis concept (Frank, 2002). 

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