Novel probes for protein chip applications

Protein microarrays (protein chips), due to their high throughput, have great potential to reduce the cycle time of drug discovery and to improve the efficiency of medical diagnostics. A great deal of effort has been made to facilitate the development of protein chips, such as the antibody microarrays. High-throughput fabrication of purified high-affinity probes is now one of the bottlenecks for protein microarrays. We discuss here three novel strategies to fabricate probes, namely, single chain antibodies displayed by phage, protein-oligonucleotide conjugates, and aptamers, which are promising in the protein chip technology.