In Situ Assembly and Screening of Enzyme Inhibitors with Surface-Tension Microarrays

摘要

Microarray technology has been developed to address the growing number of assayed entities in the modern drug-discovery process. Generally, microarrays are produced by attaching one of the interacting components to the array surface. Subsequent screening of the surface-displayed entities against a liquid sample enables the identification of specifically interacting partners. Unfortunately, such a hetero-phase assay cannot be applied accurately to the majority of (bio)chemical reactions, which normally proceed in the solution phase. Gosalia and Diamond proposed a simple, yet elegant, solution to this problem by conducting enzymatic reactions in glycerol nanodroplets printed on the surface of a glass slide. This and related techniques have subsequently been used for profiling enzyme activities, inhibitors, and polymeric biomaterials.