Invitrogen launches high-density human protein microarray

Invitrogen Corporation has launched the world's first commercially available microarray optimised for maximally functional proteins, the ProtoArray Human Protein Microarray.

This high-density protein microarray, containing more than 1,800 unique human proteins, represents a cross-section of gene families including pharmaceutically relevant protein classes such as kinases, membrane-associated, cell-signaling and metabolic proteins. The ProtoArray allows identification of protein-protein interactions in as little as four hours as contrasted with the weeks required for similar experiments to date.

Invitrogen's latest offering is the first high-density array containing a high percentage of functional human proteins. Using Invitrogen's proprietary ProtoP5 expression and purification technology, proteins on the ProtoArray slide retain superior activity profiles when compared to arrays produced using E. Coli based expression methods.

'Making a protein microarray like the ProtoArray available to the market means that we are able to address key challenges our customers face in developing new therapeutics,' explained Dr Claude Benchimol, Invitrogen's senior vice president, r&d. 'Pharmaceutical companies need to accelerate target identification in their discovery efforts and study off target effects to help reduce failure rates, and now for the first time, there is a tool that rapidly helps them do both.'

This first-in-class research tool supports the current shift from genome projects to an emphasis on studying proteins and protein function on a system wide, or proteome, scale. This is particularly important for pharmaceutical firms since proteins make up the majority of therapeutic targets. The ProtoArray is available to both commercial and academic researchers for studying a wide variety of protein interactions including protein-protein, protein-DNA and antibody specificity experiments.