Integration of an immunoassay system into a microchip for high-throughput assay

An immunosorbent assay system was integrated into a glass microchip. The scale merits of liquid microspace for molecular behavior contributed remarkably to reduced assay time, and troublesome operations required for conventional immunosorbent assays could be replaced by simple operations. Moreover, a micro-immunoassay system suitable for simultaneous assay of multiple samples was constructed on a microchip. The chip had branching multichannels and four reaction and detection regions; thus the constructed system could process four samples at a time with only one pump unit. A higher throughput assay was realized with the branching structure chip.