The Science
How our breakthrough works
Demonstration of our unique technology
Figure shows nitrocellulose (NC) strips that have had different components passed up them. The NC has target antigen printed in 8 different lines which decrease in concentration on a log10 scale. The left axis gives the quantity of antigen on each line. Units- Nanogram (ng), picogram (pg) and femtogram (fg). Right axis gives an indication of the amount of amplification beyond direct targeting of a gold conjugate to the antigen.
Each strip has eight lines of printed target antigen. Moving down the strip, each line decreases in antigen concentration by a factor of ten.
This demonstrates the signal amplification – the more lines visible, the greater the amplification.
The first strip shows a direct staining with a gold conjugate, the second strip shows amplification using a biotinalyted capture antibody. Then we have the single and double eAMP cascade showing up to 10 million times amplification on the double cascade.
The final strip is a control. You can pass up the same amount of eAMP molecules, but if you are missing the specific eAMP molecule that targets the antigen you will only get the direct binding of the gold conjugate.
eAMP molecules can be combined with a specific antibody to target the chosen antigen. Additional eAMP proteins specifically bind to the eAMP molecule preceding it, creating millions of available binding sites for visible molecules such as colloidal gold.
This specifically increases the sensitivity of antigen detection by up to 10 million times when compared to direct colloidal gold binding alone.
eAMP can be simply incorporated into existing manufacturing processes, and is easily customised for the chosen target illness.
Our new high sensitivity lateral flow tests offer a solution to the problem of mycoplasma contamination of cell cultures, one of the biggest and most costly issues in life science.