Nucleic Acids Research, 2002, Vol. 30, No. 16 e87
© 2002 Oxford University Press
DNA probes on beads arrayed in a capillary, ‘Bead-array’, exhibited high hybridization performance
1 Central Research Laboratory, Hitachi Ltd, 1-280 Higashi-Koigakubo, Kokubunji, Tokyo 185-8601, Japan and 2 Department of Biotechnology and Life Science, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, 2-24-16 Nakacho, Koganei, Tokyo 184-0012, Japan
*To whom correspondence should be addressed. Tel: +81 423 23 1111; Fax: +81 423 27 7783; Email: y-kohara{at}crl.hitachi.co.jp
A DNA analysis platform called ‘Bead-array’ is presented and its features when used in hybridization detection are shown. In ‘Bead-array’, beads of 100-µm diameter are lined in a determined order in a capillary. Each bead is conjugated with DNA probes, and can be identified by its order in the capillary. This probe array is easily produced by just arraying beads conjugated with probes into the capillary in a fixed order. The hybridization is also easily completed by introducing samples (1–300 µl) into the capillary with reciprocal flow. For hybridization detection, as little as 1 amol of fluorescent-labeled oligo DNA was detected. The hybridization reaction was completed in 1 min irrespective of the amount of target DNA. When the number of target molecules was smaller than that of probe molecules on the bead, 10 fmol, almost all targets were captured on the bead. ‘Bead-array’ enables reliable and reproducible measurement of the target quantity. This rapid and sensitive platform seems very promising for various genetic testing tasks.