Antibody Arrays for Determination of Relative Protein Abundances

As a large number of genome-sequencing projects reached completion, the attention of the scientific community is turning toward understanding the structure-functions of gene translation products—the proteins as well as the complete complement of proteins—the proteome. One goal of proteomics is to correlate changes in protein abundance with biological processes and disease states. To help accelerate this avenue of proteomics, a significant effort has been devoted to the development of multiplexed methods for protein analyses. We have developed an Antibody Microarray, a chip-based technology for multiparallel determination of relative abundance of hundreds of proteins. The Antibody Microarray is composed of hundreds of distinct monoclonal antibodies printed at high density on a glass slide. It utilizes a novel experimental setup and data analysis algorithm, which enables scientists to assay hundreds of cytosolic, nuclear, and membrane-bound proteins with a single experiment. Examples of biological samples that are analyzed on the Antibody Microarray include tissue samples, cell cultures, and body fluids.