Quality control of chip manufacture and chip analysis using epoxy-chips as a model

Biochips are miniaturized, highly ordered analysis systems which offer the unique advantage of highly parallel analysis of thousands of analytes at the same time. Although this technique has been enthusiastically developed and has promised to improve and speed up numerous biological assays, the quality control of chip manufacture, chip analysis and data management has received less attention. The following article compares three epoxy-containing chip surfaces (ARChip Epoxy, 3D-Link(TM), and EasySpot) with respect to their autofluorescence, immobilization capacity, background fluorescence and hybridization efficiency. Since data collected from biochip experiments are random snapshots with errors, inherently noisy and incomplete, we tried to evaluate technical factors causing variability and to set up quality control procedures for chip manufacture and chip analysis. Variabilities caused by arraying, glass substrate and polymer coating, fluorescent label and experimental conditions are discussed in details. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.