Fluidic Analytics Fluidity One-M system for quantifying protein interactions

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Quantitative understanding of the underlying mechanisms via which drugs and drug candidates interact with their intended targets is key for successful drug development. But conventional technologies including SPR (surface plasmon resonance) and BLI (biolayer interferometry) often struggle when characterising challenging interactions such as the formation of multi-protein complexes. These technologies rely on attaching one of the binding partners to a surface, which can interfere with the measurements and make it more difficult to distinguish whether a drug or drug candidate binds to a monomeric protein, a misfolded protein or a multi-protein complex.

Another problem with most surface-based technologies is that these methods rely on measuring binding kinetics to determine binding affinity. For heterogeneous protein targets such as complexes composed of several proteins, the binding kinetics can become increasingly complicated, which makes it challenging to extract any meaningful quantitative information about the binding reaction and its stoichiometry, specifically without any additional information on complex composition or size.

The Fluidity One-M system overcomes these challenges to quantify and characterise protein interactions in solution, using microfluidic diffusional sizing (MDS) technology — claimed to be a fundamentally new way of determining affinity (KD), size, concentration and stoichiometric information when proteins interact with DNA, lipids or other proteins. The product uses MDS technology to measure changes in molecular size (hydrodynamic radius) as binding events occur.

The system enables development of customised protocols to study a wide range of interactions, with a typical runtime of 35 min for 24 data points to determine KD. It eliminates the risk of binding artefacts or other surface constraints, as measurement directly in solution means there is no surface immobilisation. It also helps to minimise consumption of precious samples, requiring just 3.5 μL per data point (application dependent) or 50–80 μL to determine KD.

For more information and to arrange a demonstration: https://www.atascientific.com.au/products/fluidity-one-m/.