What are the advantages and disadvantages of protein array technology over existing technologies?
Nothing is perfect in our world. RT-PCR is very sensitive and it’s a very fast technology. The big disadvantage of that is that after about ten days it is difficult to trace the agent that is causing symptoms. So a test that tests for antibodies, which remain for a long time after the agent has gone, has an advantage over RT-PCR technology. The disadvantage of ELISA tests and immunofluorescence tests is that you are using a lot of material. Whereas with the microarray we are able to use as little as one microliter of serum sample in order to identify a SARS patient. This amount is one tenth to one twentieth of what is regularly being used in the other tests. Direct immunofluorescence tests I think are the most specific tests on the market, but they lack some things. One is the speed of the experiment. A human being has to sit at the microscope and look at the cells, to decide which of the serum samples originates from a real SARS patient. The thing with the microarray is that we have s
