Microbeads Development Service for Multivariate Immunoassay

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Microfluidic technology has many advantages over other conventional immunoassays such as high throughput, short analysis time, small volume, and high sensitivity. In particular, the combination of microfluidic technology and multiplex microbead-based immunoassay greatly improves sensitivity and efficiency of detection. As a leader of microfluidic technology fields, Creative Biolabs is proud of offering a full range of microfluidic based immunoassay and microfluidic chip development services to support multiplex analysis of DNA, RNA, antibodies, antigens, and a vast number of other biological molecules.

Introduction of Multiplex Microbead-based Immunoassays

Multiplex microbead-based immunoassays possess many advantages over some conventional immunoassay methods such as western blot and ELISA. They allow simultaneous detection of multiple biomolecules in one reaction vessel, greatly improving detection efficiency, shortening analysis time, decreasing sample and reagent consumption. The combination of microfluidic systems with microbead-based immunoassays provides a powerful platform for multi-analyte analysis. Compared with normal fluidic systems, the usage of microbeads greatly increases the surface to volume ratio in a microfluidic device and improves the sensitivity of assays by increasing interactions between samples and reagents. Moreover, analytes attached to the beads can be easily transported in a fluidic system with pressure-driven flow or electric fields. Although flow cytometry is a popular alternative to immunoassays with its advantages of short analysis time, low sample size, high sensitivity, and multiplexing ability with the use of encoded microbeads as solid supports, it is expensive, bulky, and cannot be integrated into a total analysis system like a fluidic chip. While microfluidic technologies can integrate all preparation, detection and analytical processes into a single mini-sized system, greatly simplifying detection and analysis procedure.

Table.1 Comparison of immunoassays.

	Bead-based microfluidic immunoassays	Flow cytometry	ELISA
Analysis Time	Short	Short	Long
Sample/Reagent Consumption	Low	Low	Large
Throughput	High	High	Low
Sensitivity	High	High	High
Multiplexing Capability	Yes	Yes	No
Procedure	Integrating all preparation, detection and analytical processes into a single mini-sized system	Requiring additional sample preparation steps	Numerous washing and preparation steps, long diffusion time required for antigen-antibody binding

Application of Bead-based Microfluidic Immunoassays

Bead-based microfluidic immunoassays have attracted a large amount of interest in various biological assay applications.

Wadhwa et al. (2012) have developed a bead-based microfluidic immunoassay for diagnosis research of Johne's disease (JD). Magnetic microbeads coated with antigens of the causative agent of JD were incubated with serum samples of JD-positive or negative serum samples and then with a fluorescently-labeled secondary antibody (SAB). The antigen-coated magnetic beads were separated by magnetical absorption within a microchannel of a glass microchip and the antigen-antibody binding fluorescence signal was measured. Results showed that the bead-based microfluidic system could provide an effective platform for the development of an on-site serodiagnosis of JD.
Yu et al. (2010) reported a microfluidic bead-based immunoassay, µFBI, for multiplexed detection of proteins with requiring only a very small amount of sample material, even only requiring 200 ng of tissue lysate.
In 2015, Yu et al. (2015) also developed a microfluidic immunoassay chip that combines a commercialized no-wash, homogeneous immunoassay technology with microfluidics, enabling rapid, automated, parallel quantitative analysis of microliter quantities of samples with a limit of detection down to 10 pg mL⁻¹.

Fig. 1 Schematic illustration of microfluidic bead-based immunoassay. Fig. 1 Microfluidic bead-based immunoassay (µFBI).^1,3

Services at Creative Biolabs

Creative Biolabs is dedicated to supporting multiplex immunoassay services based on bead-based microfluidic technologies. Our experienced scientists can design and develop different types of bead-based microfluidic immunoassays to support a variety of biomolecule detection such as proteins, DNA, small molecules. If you are interested in our services, please contact us to discuss your project.

References

Yu, X.; et al. µFBI: A Microfluidic Bead-Based Immunoassay for Multiplexed Detection of Proteins from a µL Sample Volume. PLoS One. 2010, 5(10): e13125.
Yu, Z.T.F.; et al. Rapid, automated, parallel quantitative immunoassays using highly integrated microfluidics and AlphaLISA. Sci Rep. 2015, 5, 11339.
under Open Access license CC BY 4.0, without modification.

For Research Use Only. Not For Clinical Use.