Assessment of antibody specificity using suspension bead arrays

With the increasing collection of affinity reagents, their validation in terms of functionality and binding specificity becomes a challenge. To match this growing need, miniaturized and parallelized platforms have become available to corroborate the applicability for a broad range of binder scaffolds. Among the -commonly used systems, planar microarrays have been a platform of choice for a long time but alternative systems are emerging, of which one is based on color-coded beads for the creation of arrays in suspension. The latter systems offer to perform a two-dimensional multiplexing by now analyzing up to 384 samples against up to 500 analytes in a single experiment. While the analyte parameter is flexible in terms of its composition, an extended screening can be facilitated without the need to set up a microarray production facility.