Seminar

Nucleic Acid Programmable Protein Microarrays in Biomarker Discovery

Dr. Marcin Pacek

A novel form of protein microarray, Nucleic Acid Programmable Protein Array (NAPPA), will be described. In lieu of producing and printing purified proteins, our method substitutes the printing of cDNAs encoding the proteins. Thus, the resulting array is a DNA array that can be converted into a protein array by adding cell free protein synthesis machinery. This obviates the need to purify proteins, produces human proteins in a mammalian milieu, and avoids concerns about protein stability on the array because the proteins are made just-in-time for assay. Moreover, the method displays a broad variety of proteins, insensitive to protein class or size with a high yield of protein per feature while maintaining a narrow range of protein yield from protein to protein (Science. 2004 305:86; Nat Methods. 2008 5:535).