Abstract: The present invention provides a method for the in situ synthesis of haptenylated border regions that provide a visual marker for aligning microarrays, and their development by a variety of either chemical or enzymatic methods. The invention also includes microarrays containing the visible borders. The visible borders allow for simple, direct determination of the grid location when pipetting manually, and provide an effective light-scattering marker for determination of grid location by robotic-optical methods.