Evaluating Sandwich Immunoassays in Microarray Format in Terms of the Ambient Analyte Regime

Abstract
Background: Conceptionally, antibody microarrays are simply multiplexed sandwich immunoassays in a miniaturized format. However, from the amounts of capture antibodies used, it is not apparent whether such assays are ambient analyte (Ekins. Clin Chem 1998;44:2015–30) or mass-sensing devices (Silzel et al. Clin Chem 1998;44:2036–43). We evaluated multiplexed microarray sandwich assays for 24 mouse serum proteins in these terms within the boundaries of our experimental setup and based on theoretical considerations of the law of mass action.