Abstract:
Development of novel assay systems based on surfaces, which are modified with peptides, offer new approaches to applications of biosensors in DNA-analytics, environmental monitoring and medical diagnostics.
First, a sensor surface was established, which is based on peptide nucleic acid (PNA), that was developed in the antisense technology. This peptide has a spatial structure similar to DNA, however it is more stable. The PNA-surfaces are stable for more than 300 regeneration steps and for at least a half year. With the direct optical measuring system, the Reflectometric Interference Spectroscopy (RIfS), advantages of the PNA-surfaces, when used in gene-sensor-technology were pointed out as well as in a nuclease assay, that was developed in the workgroup.
Furthermore the application of the water analyser system (RIANA) could be extended by using the flexible immobilization. With PNA-surfaces, which were stored up to six months, three different endocrine substances could be quantified. Thus the method of the flexible immobilization on the basis of PNA-surfaces was implemented on the multi-spot TIRF sensor. This method makes it possible to measure more analytes than the number of spots available in the portable RIANA-system, without changing the transducer. Now the field experiemts can be accomplished by untrained personnel.
In the following stable peptide surfaces with high loading capacity were established. These surfaces were used for development of an assay for detection of antibodies associated with coeliac disease. The linear epitope of the Transglutaminase, the autoantigen of coeliac disease, was examined. In a binding inhibition assay the peptide-sequence with the highest affinity to the antibody could be found using the parallel, label-free detection method, RIfS. In the single channel RIfS system the affinity constants of the relevant peptide sequences were determined. Antibodies in blood serum were detected with this peptide.
In order to use smaller sample quantity for antibody detection in the parallel RIfS, the parallel RIfS the method was miniaturized. To achieve this, novel nanowells with diameter of 250µm and a height of 500 µm were produced. An existing miniaturized optical assembly was combined with a pipetting system, which dispenses 96 drops in the nanolitre range in parallel (TopSpot), for filling the wells.