Protein nanoarrays generated by dip-pen nanolithography

Dip-pen nanolithography was used to construct arrays of proteins with 100- to 350-nanometer features. These nanoarrays exhibit almost no detectable nonspecific binding of proteins to their passivated portions even in complex mixtures of proteins, and therefore provide the opportunity to study a variety of surface-mediated biological recognition processes. For example, reactions involving the protein features and antigens in complex solutions can be screened easily by atomic force microscopy. As further proof-of-concept, these arrays were used to study cellular adhesion at the submicrometer scale.