Our motivation for developing a bacterial inkjet printer is to enable precise control of the spatial arrangement of interacting microbial strains. We have adapted POSaM to create a simple piezoelectric printer for patterning bacteria onto a substrate such as a glass slide, agar plate, or nitrocellulose membrane. POSaM employs piezoelectric inkjets because they are able to print a wider variety of solvents and because they are easier to clean. In piezoelectric inkjets, voltage-induced deformation of a rectangular piezoelectric crystal squeezes ink droplets through the nozzle. In thermal inkjets, a resistive heating element causes air bubbles to expand, expelling a liquid drop. There are two main classes of inkjet printers, thermal and piezoelectric. The printing of tissues or organs may be eventually possible by extending high throughput 2D methods for patterned cell attachment and cell printing. Other examples include printing of bacterial colonies, adhesion substrates for patterning neuronal cells in culture, protein arrays, and patterned growth of mouse myoblast cells on surfaces coated with inkjet printed growth factors. One example, POSaM (Piezoelectric Oligonucleotide Synthesizer and Microarrayer), achieves de novo synthesis of oligonucleotide microarrays by using an inkjet printhead to deposit phosphoramidite precursors and a tetrazole activator at precise locations on glass slides. A number of biological applications have been developed. In the electronics industry, inkjet printing finds use in printing electronic circuits using conductive polymer “inks”, in maskless photolithography, or in creating low cost and flexible polymer light-emitting diode (PLED) displays by printing electroluminescent conductive polymers.
Besides commercial printing of ink on paper, there are many other useful applications of inkjet technology.
0 kommentar(er)
