Visualization of high-throughput and label-free antibody-polypeptide binding for drug screening based on microarrays and surface plasmon resonance imaging.

This work presents a visualization method for the high-throughput monitoring of antibody-polypeptide binding by integrating a microarray chip with surface plasmon resonance imaging (SPRi). A prism-coupled SPRi system with smart images processing software and a 5 × 5 polypeptide microarray was developed. The modeling analysis was performed to optimize the system and the materials of prism and chip, looking for the optimal incident wavelength and angle of incidence for dynamic SPRi detection in solution. The system can dynamically monitor 25 tunnels of biomolecule interactions in solution without secondary tag reactants. In addition, this system can determine the specific profile of antibody-polypeptide binding in each tunnel and yield a visual three-dimensional histogram of dynamic combinations in all microarray tunnels. Furthermore, the detection limit of the label-free antibody-polypeptide binding reached 1 pg/μL in a one-step binding test, and an ultrasensitive detection of 10 fg/μL was obtained using three-step cascade binding. Using the peptide microarray, the amount of sample and reagents used was reduced to 80 nL per tunnel, and 20 × 20 tunnels of biomolecule interactions could be analyzed in parallel in a 7 mm × 7 mm microreaction cells. This device and method offer a potential platform for high-throughput and label-free dynamic monitoring multiple biomolecule interactions for drug discovery and basic biomedical research.