Fabrication of Antibody Arrays Using Thermally Responsive Elastin Fusion Proteins

The use of high-throughput antibody arrays for simultan-eous detection of multiple analytes has gained considerable interest in the area of medical and environmental diagnostics.1 Since detection occurs in a dedicated microregion on the array surface, the ability to spatially pattern antibodies on a defined region is essential. A variety of soft lithography, photolithography, ink-jet printing, and array printing techniques are currently available for patterning an array surface.2 In most cases, antibody immobiliza-tion involves either covalent coupling or interaction with an immobilized ligand.3 A principal problem with these methods is a loss of the functionality due to covalent modifications of the binding site and the random orientation which results in steric blockage of the binding sites.3 To overcome these drawbacks, an intervening layer of protein A, G, or L (ProA, ProG, or ProL),4 which selectively binds different types of immunoglobulin (Ig) wit