Protein Arrays: An Attractive Approach for the Simultaneous Measurement of Many Protein/Small Molecule Binding Events in Small Sample Volumes

Marcella Chiari, Istituto di Chimica del Riconoscimento Molecolare Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche

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Launch presentation

About the speaker

Marcella Chiari is a Senior Research Scientist at the Italian National Research Council. She leads the "Analytical Microsystem Laboratory" at the Institute of Molecular Recognition in Milan, Italy. Dr. Chiari has world-wide recognized experience in development of hydrophilic linear polymers. She is active in the area of protein and DNA microarray; her main interest is the development of innovative polymeric coatings for glass slides. She has developed a number of new hydrophilic acrylic monomers and polymers to be used in capillary electrophoresis as DNA sieving matrices and capillary coatings.

Abstract

Life is based on biomolecular interactions. The investigation of these interactions is a major issue in biology, biochemistry and in clinical diagnostics. Microarrays have been successfully applied for the identification, quantification, and functional analysis of biomolecules in basic and applied research. To satisfy the growing demand for fast, reliable, and sensitive analysis, large effort is put nowadays into developing novel tools. Recently, the advantages of time-resolved and label-free detection systems have gained much interest because they need no labels, e.g. fluorescence dyes, which can significantly affect the interaction processes leading to modified signals and hence to wrong results. Reflectometric Interference Spectroscopy (RIfS) is a versatile direct optical and time-resolved method for investigating a great variety of biomolecular interaction systems. The newly developed imaging RIfS (iRIfS) setup allows biomolecular interaction analysis on free scalable arrays with up to 1000 spots with unmatched flexibility and high performance. iRIfS is extremely robust against temperature changes and can handle all transparent transducer materials. The performance will be demonstrated with protein- and DNA-array measurements.

Launch presentation