High Throughput Technique for Creating Peptide Microchips
Xeotron Corporation announced the publication of a scientific paper in the Nat. Biotechnol. 2002, 20 (8) issue of Nature Biotechnology (Pellios J.P. et al., electronic publication ahead of print) that presents their novel method of synthesizing peptide microchips.
The article reports the development of an efficient and flexible proprietary technology for producing individually addressable peptide microchips using digital photolithography.
These findings have significant implications in the development of highly specific peptide biochips for the analysis of proteins for the purpose of drug discovery.
The paper co-authored by Xiaolian Gao, Ph.D., co-founder and chief science officer at Xeotron, entitled "Individually Addressable Parallel Peptide Synthesis on Microchip," describes Xeotron's method for parallel synthesis of peptide microchips. Xeotron's scientists demonstrated that the peptidomimedic sequences on the microchips showed specific antibody binding and provided insights into the molecular details that define the specificity of the epitope-binding site. The development of peptide chip synthesis was the result of collaboration between Xeotron scientists and researchers from the Department of Chemistry, University of Houston, based in Houston, Texas, and the Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Michigan, based in Ann Arbor, Mich.
"This discovery is a clear validation of the power and efficacy of our technology platform," said Xiaochaun Zhou, Ph.D., president and chief technology officer of Xeotron and co-author.
"Xeotron's technology can produce biochips that can advance biomedical research at the proteomic level, without the exorbitant costs, time and contamination that often exists with microchips."
Xeotron has developed an in situ photosynthesis platform for peptide microchips that uses digital light to activate Photo Generated Reagent chemistry (PGR) in a microfluidic chip that utilizes 20 amino acids and synthetic monomers in short reaction times to produce thousands of peptides in a chip the size of one square centimeter.
Xeotron's approach requires only one conventional synthesizer and computer controllable optical molecule, which allows for the rapid development of peptide microchips for a variety of pharmaceutical and proteomic applications.
Peptide microchips are much like DNA chips, but are used to facilitate the high throughout analysis of proteins and accelerate drug discovery. There are myriad applications for peptide microchips including: studying protein-protein interactions, creating diagnostics using biomarkers, examining gene expression profiles and developing antibodies.
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