In the fields of molecular biology and biochemistry, biopolymers such as nucleic acids and proteins from organisms are identified and fractionated in order to search useful genes or to diagnose diseases. As a pre-treatment of such identification and fractionation, a hybridization reaction is often employed in which a target molecule in a sample is hybridized with a nucleic acid or a protein of a known sequence. For this purpose, a probe-bearing element known as a biochip, a DNA disc or the like is used which bears probes such as DNA, RNA, protein and the like with known sequences at predetermined positions.
The probe-bearing element is provided with a plurality of features that are bound with diverse probes, respectively. The probe-bearing element is placed in a reaction vessel called a chamber together with sample DNA such that the sample DNA labeled with fluorescence hybridizes with the probes bound to the features of the probe-bearing element. Then, the probe-bearing element is irradiated with excitation light, thereby detecting fluorescence intensity at each feature to determine an amount of binding between each probe and the sample DNA. The results can be used as advantageous information.
Conventionally, as described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,445,934, a probe-bearing element is generally produced one by one at a time by synthesizing a protein or a DNA probe of interest on a feature of the probe-bearing element. Such conventional method is troublesome and time-consuming, and thus increases the cost of the probe-bearing element. As a result, probe-bearing elements are unsuitable to be generally used in, for example, hospitals for diagnosing genetic diseases. Moreover, since the synthesis has limitation in producing long probes, the types of DNA used as probes are also limited.
The present invention was accomplished in view of the above problems, and aims at providing a probe-bearing element which can be mass produced and which has a stable quality, and a method for producing the probe-bearing element.