CCL launches SPR

Engineers at UK-based Cambridge Consultants (CCL) have developed a new system for the phase imaging of Surface Plasmon Resonance (SPR), enabling the high-throughput array-based analysis of molecular binding events, label-free.

SPR has become widely used to characterise single biomolecular binding events, but there has been a need for array-based analytical methods that can be used to detect such interactions without a requirement for molecular labelling. CCL's new proprietary sensing technique exploits the intrinsic high sensitivity of SPR imaging and interferometry in a single unit to enable the array-based, phase imaging analysis of biomolecular interactions, label free.

Unlike conventional intensity-based SPR instruments, the basis of the new system is the interferometric measurement of the spatial variation of the reflected phase as a function of the refractive index.

Dr Robert Jones, who led the development of the new system, believes that this new phase-based technique is better suited to the measurement of multiple, small-binding sites than current intensity-based methods. 'Existing intensity-based methods fall broadly into two categories,' he explains. 'But both are constrained in their ability to image and measure multiple small binding sites.'

'Our new technique enables the highly parallel measurement of multiple small binding sites using high density arrays, speeding up analysis by a significant factor,' Julian Pieters, product engineering group leader at CCL, said.. We have successfully imaged patterned substrates with a grid spacing of 250µm and achieved low levels of background noise without environmental screening or temperature control. This has been achieved in real-time and with all the benefits of the high-sensitivity intrinsic to SPR,'