A process has been developed for chemically treating a wide range of oxides, including glass, quartz, native oxide on silicon, and stainless steel, using cold plasmas rather than traditional wet chemical treatments. Cold plasmas are gases that have become ionized by the application of a significant electrical field, and are commonly used within the microelectronics industry to etch and clean silicon wafers. When repurposed to modify the chemistry of a surface, they provide a clean, inexpensive means of manufacturing substrates that can permanently bind biomolecules.

The oxide surfaces were treated to produce an epoxide-terminated surface. Epoxide chemical groups can covalently bind many biomolecules, including proteins and modified oligonucleotides, and epoxide-terminated glass slides are one of the most popular starting materials for microarray fabrication. The cold-plasma-treated oxide surfaces had densities of biomolecule binding comparable to those produced using existing wet-chemistry-based means, but can be produced at a much lower cost.