What would you discover, if you could do 10,000 times more screens with your compound library? Less is more. About 10,000 times more, in fact. Now you can afford HTS.
Reaction Biology Corporation uses a patent-pending mix of established technologies to perform High Throughput Screening at the nanoliter scale, while preserving quality, speed and simplicity. Combining genomics microarray printing technology and proprietary picoliter aerosol deposition, RBC has commercialized a novel technology that drives uHTS to new levels of simplicity and efficiency. Homogeneous assays are performed on a slide utilizing orders of magnitude less compound and target than existing methods. For more information on the technology, see the ASSAY and Drug Development Technologies Paper.
Step One: Print. Compounds are printed in solution with a microarray printer. Each printed dot is in liquid form, yet only 1.0 nanoliters in volume – 1/10,000 the volume of a microplate well. Each microarray can holdup to 7,000 DiscoveryDots™. Using this technique, a million compounds could be stored in duplicate on 300 slides. The entire library would fit in a shoebox, and can be stored until ready for use. Given the volume of liquid in each dot, a supply of 1 microliter of compound can be used for up to 500 separate reactions. Due to the extremely small volumes used in the process, it also can be used for radio-isotope assays and will produce only a fraction of the radioactive material of well-plate technology, greatly reducing the problem of isotope storage and disposal.
Step Two: Activate. Dots on the slide are far too small for individual application of target to each one. Therefore, a special piezo-electric nozzle is used to spray target and reagents over the slides. This way, 1,000,000 reactions could be activated with only 600 micrograms of target. This technique can be used for a wide variety of fluorescence based assays. Using the DiscoveryDot™ platform, over 500,000 reactions can be activated in a single day, on a benchtop.
Step Three: Scan. After the appropriate incubation period, the slides are read using a standard microarray scanner. The high density of the dots allows for the scanning of many reactions at one time. Using the DiscoveryDot™ process, 500,000 reactions can be activated and scanned in one day on a bench top.
Step Four: Data. Data for the assay is returned to the customer in excel or text file format. If desired, a TIFF file of the scan can be supplied as well. The assay formats are the same as those run in 384 well-plate, with similar data.
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