Paper BI-FrM4
SPR Microscopy and its Applications to High-Throughput Analyses of Biomolecular Binding Events and their Kinetics

Friday, October 19, 2007, 9:00 am, Room 609

Surface plasmon resonance (SPR) sensing has long been used to study biomolecular binding events and their kinetics in a label-free way. This approach has been extended to SPR microscopy more recently, which is an ideal tool for probing large microarrays of biomolcules for their binding interactions with various partners and the kinetics of such binding. SPR microscopes now make it possible to simultaneously monitor binding kinetics on >1300 spots within a protein microarray with a detection limit of below 1 ng per cm2, or <100 femtograms per spot (< 2 million protein molecules) with a time resolution of 1 s, and spot-to-spot reproducibility within a few percent. The method is label free and uses orders of magnitude less of the precious biomolecules than standard SPR sensing. It also gives the absolute bound amount and binding stoichiometry. Experiments designed to demonstrate that this approach is capable of high-throughput kinetic studies of the binding of small (200-500 Da) ligands onto large protein microarrays will be described.