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 and most demands come from the fact that it is a production process 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 kit 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: it is important to keep to perform regular maintenance.