The first microarray scanner, built in 1989 by Stephen Fodor and colleagues at Affymax, was a table-sized, home-built affair that included a Zeiss confocal microscope, a laser, and several mirrors.

We conceived of the DNA microarray in 1993 to speed up gene expression analysis by combining biology and high technology. We adapted Affymetrix VLSIPS technology to synthesize yeast microarrays, and ...

For Affymetrix-manufactured microarrays, the method entails labeling DNA with biotin, then adding streptavidin conjugated to phycoerythrin after hybridization (represented by yellow circles).