The Antibody arrays plays a contributing role to suffice the requirements of the Western-blot based protocol where you have no specific multiplex assay requirements.
For more than 5 decades, researchers have been widely benefitting from the application of several immunoassays for monitoring and identifying several protein expressions. This technique usually involves use of antibody specific targets to their protein of interest. While the immunoassays were initially limited for basic drug research and discovery, recently, the techniques underwent expansions to cover several different aspects of clinical and diagnostic research spaces.
The advent of the advanced Luminex multiplex assays provided researchers ample of opportunities for acquiring more information regarding either the protein or protein series. There was a dual advantage of the Luminex assays over other forms of similar bioanalytical reactions – gather information within less time and rule out the need of large sample volumes. Researchers are further involving themselves to contributing more and more research tools to aid such Luminex multiplex cytokine assays for investigating cellular regulatory events. These cellular regulatory events have become the bread and butter of the cancer research. Luminex cytokine assays are not only important for the research institutions, but even the pharmaceutical giants have now well understood their importance for increasing the testing power.
Here’s a quick insight into some of the latest versions of the Luminous Multiplex Assay Panels available in the market –
Plate-based assays –
The commonest example of this assay panel is the 96-well multiplexing ELISA plate. The 96 well microtiter plate are of great importance for several assay techniques such as PCR and ELISA.The rows on the plate are numbered either with letters or numbers or both and features a notch as well in its upper right corner which helps the user to correctly determine the plate orientation.
Antibody arrays and microfluidics –
The Antibody arrays plays a contributing role to suffice the requirements of the Western-blot based protocol where you have no specific multiplex assay requirements. The main advantage and edge that these tools have over their other competitors in the market is their affordable screening technique. These affordable screening devices features antibody bound membranes which have the potent ability of detecting around 111 cytokines at one go.
Yet another version of the antibody arrays available in the market is that consisting of a ceramic tile coated with specific target antibodies in a 5 x 5 array representation. This 5 x 5 multiplex representation facilitates multiplexing up to 25 such assays. For performing the small molecule arrays, a 7 x 7 high density format should be more than sufficient.
Bead-based immunoassays –
Bead-based assays involves the color-coded microspheres or beads to couple with either the antigens or the antibodies to be multiplexed together thereby representing high-plex immunoassays. Such assays offers several other advantages as well including ability of screening high counts of analytes and ease of screening applicability. However, there’s just potential drawback to this technique and that is the optimization required for developing the immunoassay. This bead-based Luminex multiplex assay is a long procedure involving multiple analysis steps including antigen-antibody coupling; testing them against optimal conditions; and the time and temperature involved in incubating the coupled reactants.
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