Antibody Microarrays: Current Status and Key Technological Advances

Abstract

Antibody-based microarrays are among the novel classes of rapidly evolving proteomic technologies that holds great promise in biomedicine. Miniaturized microarrays (< 1 cm2) can be printed with thousands of individual antibodies carrying the desired specificities, and with biological sample (e.g., an entire proteome) added, virtually any specifically bound analytes can be detected. While consuming only minute amounts (< microL scale) of reagents, ultra- sensitive assays (zeptomol range) can readily be performed in a highly multiplexed manner. The microarray patterns generated can then be transformed into proteomic maps, or detailed molecular fingerprints, revealing the composition of the proteome. Thus, protein expression profiling and global proteome analysis using this tool will offer new opportunities for drug target and biomarker discovery, disease diagnostics, and insights into disease biology. Adopting the antibody microarray technology platform, several biomedical applications, ranging from focused assays to proteome-scale analysis will be rapidly emerging in the coming years. This review will discuss the current status of the antibody microarray technology focusing on recent technological advances and key issues in the process of evolving the methodology into a high-performing proteomic research tool.

Stable recombinant alpaca antibodies for detection of Tulip virus X

“…Examples are the development of easy-to-handle, field-compatible tests such as lateralflow (Delmulle et al 2005), but also more complex test set-ups like flow-cytometry (Chitarra et al 2002), and multiplex detection using Luminex (Rao et al 2004;Peters et al 2007) or protein chips (Taitt et al 2004). Use of recombinant antibodies, fused to specific tags, may facilitate multiplex design (Wingren and Borrebaeck 2006). Such tags may comprise DNA (Jongsma and Litjens 2006), His-stretches (Larsson et al 2005) or many other oligo-peptidic moieties.…”

Approaching clinical proteomics: current state and future fields of application in fluid proteomics

“…The bound molecules are detected by a secondary antibody marked with a fluorescent dye, or directly if the sample has been fluorescently labeled. The incubated chips can be read by a variety of scanners based on non-confocal, confocal and planar wave guide technology (89).…”

Oncoproteomics: New trends in analytical techniques

“…The microarray patterns that are generated can then be converted into proteomic maps, or molecular fingerprints, revealing the composition of the proteome. Using this techniques, global proteome analysis and protein expression profiling will thus provide new opportunities for biomarker discovery, drug target identification and disease diagnostics, as well as providing insights into disease biology [13].…”