Genewave Announces Commercial Launch of AmpliSlide™, High-Sensitivity Microarray Slides

Genewave S.A.S. has announced the launch of the AmpliSlide™ product range, a new generation of revolutionary high-sensitivity reflective microarray slides. These slides provide researchers with a large sensitivity budget that brings many benefits in a wide variety of situations.

"Genewave is proud to offer this high-sensitivity tool to the life-science community," said Claude Weisbuch, PhD, President of Genewave. "We have beta-tested AmpliSlide™ substrates in numerous European academic and private research labs with remarkable success. Researchers can now study lower-expressed genes, leading to new biological insights, thanks to the higher sensitivity of our slides", Weisbuch said.

AmpliSlide™ combines a proprietary, fluorescence-amplifying dielectric coating of the slide with highly-efficient binding chemistries. AmpliSlide™ 570/670 A (aminosilane), the first product released today is designed for double colour (Cy™3/Cy™5 or analogous dyes) DNA microarray experiments. This special reflective coating is finely tailored to provide up to 16-fold signal enhancement balanced in both colours, compared to leading competitors’ conventional aminosilane microarray slides.

“Counter intuitively the situation where the array is printed on conventional glass slide is extremely detrimental to both the fluorescence excitation and emission processes,” explained Constantin Nelep, PhD, Genewave’s Advanced Microarray Substrates Product Manager. “Firstly the fluorescence excitation is partly inhibited because of destructive interference which occurs at the air-glass interface, and secondly only a small percentage of the emitted light reaches the detection optics, while most of the fluorescence is merely trapped within the glass slide”.

“AmpliSlide™ addresses this problem with a proprietary optical multilayer reflective coating deposited on the glass surface prior to chemical functionalisation. Constructive interference effects are exploited to concentrate the light emitted from the spots into a narrow cone and redirect its greatest part onto the collection optics of the microarray scanner,” Nelep said.

AmpliSlide™ users can look forward to many benefits including:

• Decrease of detection threshold
• Detection of low expression genes
• Reduction the required biological materials quantities, which is crucial in the case of rare or expensive target materials, such as biopsy samples
• Reduction of the number of required biological amplification steps
• Savings of costly reagents (such as fluorescent labels).

AmpliSlide™ is compatible with all standard microarray equipment, such as arrayers, hybridization stations and top-reading scanners.

“First responses to AmpliSlide™ from research laboratories have been remarkably positive. Our initial sales figures are very encouraging, and we’re especially keen to make the product available to the international microarray community,” Weisbuch said.

Other chemistries such as epoxysilane will be added to the AmpliSlide™ range and released within the following months, so that an even wider portion of the scientific community can enjoy the benefits of AmpliSlide™ technology.

AmpliSlide products will be presented at:

• Discovery 2 Diagnostics (formerly Chips to Hits), Boston – 25-27 September 2006;
• EuroBio, Paris – 25-27 October, 2006;
• Advances in Microarray Technology, Amsterdam – 31 October – 2 November 2006.