Peptide/protein biomarker tools

Automated sample preparation is a key component of any biomarker discovery system. Bruker Daltonics is introducing a magnetic bead based system for the selective capture and enrichment of certain classes of peptides and proteins directly from serum, or from other biological samples.

This sample preparation technology is automated on Bruker Daltonics' ClinProt liquid handling robots in 96 well microtiter plate formats for throughput and reproducibility. Various magnetic bead types with different chemical or biological functionalities are available for exploratory biomarker studies, including normal phase, anionic, cationic, hydrophobic and metal-ion beads. Magnetic beads with specific biological recognition and capture properties are under development, or can be developed in collaboration with customers.

Magnetic bead based enrichment or selective capture in solution is very easy to use. It can be significantly more sensitive and provide higher dynamic range than any surface capture on chips. Moreover, automation is robust, and quantification generally will be improved. Customers can also benefit from the flexibility to implement two-dimensional clean-up procedures on the same robot. Measurements using bead-based extraction from solutions appear to be an order of magnitude less costly than more expensive chip-based methods.

The ClinProt liquid handling robots deposit the samples directly onto the microtiter format AnchorChip targets for analysis by either an AutoFlex or UltraFlex Maldi-TOF for the high-resolution, multi-channel detection of large numbers of biomarkers with high sensitivity and mass accuracy. Further understanding on significant putative biomarkers can be obtained by de novo sequencing of the selected biomarkers using Maldi-TOF/TOF on the UltraFlex TOF/TOF system.