A new technique eliminates the use of monoclonal antibodies and is robust enough for field use

Monoclonal antibodies may soon become a thing of the past. While their high selectivity and affinity for their targets once made them the “gold standard” for detection applications, the time it takes to generate one and the variability in sensitivity has made the need for an alternative more prominent in recent years.

This is the challenge scientists at the US Army Research Laboratory tackled and reported in a recent Methods publication.

In the publication, authors Matthew Coppock and Dimitra Stratis-Cullum describe efforts to attach peptides to magnetic beads for potential use in the field. Their studies were performed using the Advances in Bead-Based Biomarker Detection [Methods xMAP Issue]