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ELISA - An Aging Technique

While widely utilized, ELISA has significant limitations. In order to capture antigen of interest from the sample, a relatively large amount of sample is required. xMAP Technology offers an attractive alternative.

by Luminex

While widely utilized, ELISA has significant limitations. In order to capture antigen of interest from the sample, a relatively large amount of sample is required. xMAP Technology offers an attractive alternative, delivering the benefits of ELISA, but also the added value of higher throughput, increased flexibility, reduced sample volume, and low cost, all with the same workflow as ELISA.

xMAP - More Flexible, More Affordable

Luminex’s® xMAP Technology has been utilized in over 7,700 publications, and can be applied to both protein and nucleic acid applications. The suspended beads allow for assay flexibility in a single-plex or multiplex format. Since the beads have the capture antibody immobilized on their much smaller surface area compared to a microplate well, smaller sample volumes are required and non-specific binding is reduced. More recently, the MAGPIX® system and magnetic MagPlex® microspheres have further reduced the cost of performing a single-plex assay.

The Thomas Joos laboratory at Natural and Medical Sciences Institute (NMI) at the University of Tuebingen performed a compari¬son of a sandwich immunoassay on ELISA and xMAP Technology using the MAGPIX system from Luminex. The details of this work may be found in a Luminex white paper:

www.luminexcorp.com/forms/xmap-elisa/

Reduce Costs - Use xMAP Technology

The NMI comparison assumed 80-samples per plate with 16 wells used for background and standards. The MAGPIX assay (24) was less than half the cost of the standard ELISA (56), utilizing the same pair of antibodies and the same recombinant standard. Results obtained by the two different methods were comparable, though MAGPIX was determined to be more linear, to have a superior Limit of Detection (LoD) and a superior Limit of Quantitation (LoQ), without increasing labor or turn-around-time.

xMAP – Do More With Less

xMAP Technology offers all the benefits of the ELISA with the added value of higher throughput, increased flexibility, reduced sample and lower costs with the same workflow as ELISA. Luminex assays using the same antibody pairs out-perform ELISA and show significant cost savings without increasing labor. Furthermore, Luminex offers the flexibility to multiplex as well, and in that case labor cost would decrease by a factor of the multiplex level, i.e. labor costs would decrease by one-half if a two-plex was performed.

In so many ways, xMAP will enable your lab to do more with less.

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