In addition to separations, the unique properties of fluorous compounds allow them to be immobilized onto fluorous modified glass surfaces in the formation of microarrays.  Prof. Nicola Pohl at Iowa State University first demonstrated that microarrays could be formed using a fluorous modified slide by spotting fluorous tagged carbohydrates and detecting specific carbohydrate-lectin interactions. [1] Recently, Prof. Pohl has expanded the fluorous microarray work to the quantitative evaluation of lectin-carbohydrate binding and the elucidation of new lectin binding motifs. [2] Based on this seminal work, fluorous small molecule microarrays were then produced independently by Prof. David Spring and co-workers at the University of Cambridge [3] and Prof. Stuart Schreiber and co-workers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.[4]  The latter publication validated the fluorous microarray data by comparing the results over three different enzymes with that found using biochemical assays and SPR.  Given the number of molecular classes that have been synthesized using fluorous techniques, it is highly likely that these other classes can also be immobilized in microarrays.

Fluorous based microarrays are highlighted by:

• excellent spot morphology
• exceptionally high signal-to-noise ratios
• low and uniform background fluorescence levels
• low non-specific binding
• simpler workflows through the minimization of blocking and washing steps

Fluorous chemistry is the only strategy which allows synthesis, purification, and immobilization using a single tag in a streamlined process with no other chemical manipulations.  One can go directly from chemical reactions to purification to microarray formation linking high quality content generation with high quality assay results.

1. Ko, K.S.; Jaipuri, F.A.; Pohl, N.A. “Fluorous-Based Carbohydrate Microarrays” J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2005, 127, 13162-13163.
2. Jaipuri, F.A.; Collet, B.Y.M.; Pohl, N.L., “Synthesis and Quantitative Evaluation of Glycero-D-manno-Heptose Binding to Concanavalin A by Fluorous-Tag Assistance” Angewandte Chemie International Edition 2008, DOI: 10.1002/anie.200704262.
3. Nicholson, R.L.; Ladlow, M.L.; Spring, D. "Fluorous tagged small molecule microarrays" Chem. Commun., 2007, 38, 3906.
4. Vegas, A.J.; Bradner, J.E.; Tang, W.; McPherson, O.M.; Greenberg, E.F.; Koehler, A.N.; Schreiber, S.L. “Fluorous-Based Small-Molecule Microarrays for the Discovery of Histone Deacetylase Inhibitors” Angewandte Chemie International Edition 2007, 46, 42, 7960.