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Quantification of protein interactions and solution transport using high-density GMR sensor arrays

Nature Nanotechnology volume 6, pages 314–320 (2011)Cite this article

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Abstract

Monitoring the kinetics of protein interactions on a high-density sensor array is vital to drug development and proteomic analysis. Label-free kinetic assays based on surface plasmon resonance are the current gold standard, but they have poor detection limits, suffer from non-specific binding, and are not amenable to high-throughput analyses. Here, we show that magnetically responsive nanosensors that have been scaled to over 100,000 sensors per cm2 can be used to measure the binding kinetics of various proteins with high spatial and temporal resolution. We present an analytical model that describes the binding of magnetically labelled antibodies to proteins that are immobilized on the sensor surface. This model is able to quantify the kinetics of antibody–antigen binding at sensitivities as low as 20 zeptomoles of solute.

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Figure 1: GMR nanosensor and nanoparticle system for kinetic analysis.
Figure 2: Comparison of experimentally generated binding curves to kinetic model predictions.
Figure 3: The kinetic model can predict the number of protein binding events.
Figure 4: Visualization of spatiotemporal resolution of the sensor array.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported, in part, by the United States National Cancer Institute (grants 1U54CA119367, 1U54CA143907, 1U54CA151459 and N44CM–2009-00011), the United States National Science Foundation (grant ECCS-0801385-000), the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency/Navy (grant N00014–02-1–0807), a Gates Foundation Grand Challenge Exploration Award and The National Semiconductor Corporation. R.S.G. acknowledges financial support from the Stanford Medical School Medical Scientist Training Program and a National Science Foundation graduate research fellowship. The authors thank M. Hammer and A. Bhattacharjee for editing the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Bioengineering, Stanford University, California, 94305, USA

    Richard S. Gaster

  2. Medical Scientist Training Program, School of Medicine, Stanford University, California, 94305, USA

    Richard S. Gaster

  3. Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Stanford University, California, 94305, USA

    Liang Xu, Robert J. Wilson & Shan X. Wang

  4. IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York, 10598, USA

    Shu-Jen Han

  5. Department of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University, California, 94305, USA

    Drew A. Hall & Shan X. Wang

  6. MagArray Inc., Sunnyvale, California, 94089, USA

    Sebastian J. Osterfeld & Heng Yu

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Contributions

R.S.G. and S.X.W designed the research. R.S.G. performed the research. R.S.G., R.J.W. and S.X.W developed the model. R.S.G., L.X., S.H., R.J.W., D.A.H., S.J.O., H.Y. and S.X.W. contributed analytical tools. R.S.G., R.J.W. and S.X.W analysed the data. S.J.O., L.X., S.H. and S.X.W. designed the magnetic sensor arrays. R.S.G. and H.Y. developed the biochemistry. R.S.G. and S.X.W. wrote the paper.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Shan X. Wang.

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Competing interests

Stanford University has licensed part of the magnetic bioassay chip technology contained in this publication to MagArray Inc., an early stage startup company in Silicon Valley, USA. S.X.W, H.Y., and S.J.O. hold financial interests in MagArray in the form of stock options.

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Gaster, R., Xu, L., Han, SJ. et al. Quantification of protein interactions and solution transport using high-density GMR sensor arrays. Nature Nanotech 6, 314–320 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2011.45

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