Investigation of a Novel Microtiter Plate Support Material and Scanner Quantitation of Immunoassays, Proteins and Phospholipids

Abstract
A recently developed shallow-well microtiter plate, made from a specially formulated polymer that binds proteins, peptides and nucleic acids rapidly and efficiently, has been investigated for use in solid-phase immunoassays as well as for protein and phospholipid assays. The assay uses quantitation of the color intensity of a dye on the solid phase by means of a simple desk-top scanner coupled to a computer which allows the gray-scale density of the color to be easily and accurately measured. Consequently, this approach is independent of the absorption spectrum of the dye used. These studies demonstrate that the novel technology incorporated into these unique shallow-well microtiter plates has potential in both protein and immunoassays. In the latter case, there are considerable savings in both time and material costs over conventional ELISA methods. The scanning software provided for the solid-phase immunoassay is user configurable for other densitometry assays on different solid matrices and can be read directly into a spreadsheet file for subsequent data manipulation.