ELISA coating

At the most basic level, a multichannel pipette is enough to coat a single plate. However, ELISA coating is typically applied to many plates at a time and is normally a production process. Therefore, automation is highly desired.

Plate coating is a demanding process. Most demands come from the fact that it is a production process, thus involving the preparation of many plates per day. The most important demands are:

• Throughput: Can range from a few dozen plates per day for homebrew ELISA assays to hundreds or even thousands of plates per day for kith manufacturers. To achieve this throughput, a very fast microplate washer is required.
• Reliable handling of troublesome ingredients: the reagents used in plate coating can be troublesome, as they may clog the thin needles typically found in microplate washers (for example, buffers containing high salt or sugar concentrations) or produce large amounts of foam (for example, detergent-containing wash buffers or protein solutions).
• Low residual volume: this is of utmost importance when removing the blocking reagent, as any residues would interfere with the actual assay and the washing steps in the plates.
• Easy setup: time is gold when processing large quantities of plates. Therefore, it is important to start your daily work as soon as possible.
• Easy maintenance: similarly, it is important to keep low the time and money to be spent in maintenance, and to avoid long downtimes in case of failure.