Apt screening with microfluidics

California researchers have developed a microfluidics-based platform that isolated nucleic acid aptamer leads with nanomolar binding affinities in a single round of screening. Although the paper provided proof of principle by screening a DNA aptamer library, companies polled by SciBX think the technology could also be used to screen libraries of small molecules and peptides.

Nucleic acid aptamers are single strands of DNA or RNA that can bind to and inhibit proteins and other molecular targets. The current method of screening aptamer libraries-systematic evolution of ligands by exposure enrichment (SELEX)-uses molecular separation techniques to select for hits and PCR to amplify those hits prior to the next round of screening...