9810458 Ozanich This Phase I Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) project will significantly improve the quality and speed of immunoassays by integrating a "renewable column" with an existing automated microliter liquid handling system. The renewable column will be used to trap antibody-coated microparticles, while allowing the efficient addition of reagents during mixing, washing and incubation operations. An electromagnetic trap and a mechanical piston trap will be compared based on analytical performance, cost and practicality. Feasibility of the approach will be demonstrated by measuring atrazine in environmental waters using an enzyme-linked spectrophotometric detection method. The use of immunoassay test kits for measuring herbicides in environmental waters is increasing dramatically. While immunoassays can be performed in the field, they require many manual operations that are slow and prone to errors. Oftentimes, these assays are performed with no standardization or interference checking, which puts the quality of the data produced into question. The flow injection immunosensor system is expected to be more accurate than manual immunoassays and five times more precise. Ten-fold reductions are anticipated for analysis time and 100-fold reductions in the consumption of costly antibodies may be possible using a regenerating/renewable column. The resulting instrument will be easy to use and produce consistently high quality data. This instrument would be ideally suited for cost-effective monitoring of pesticides and herbicides in environmental waters. In addition, the general design of the system would provide great flexibility in the choice of the method of sample processing and detection. Important "spin-off" products could be developed with minor changes in hardware and implementation of new methods. Other potential applications include measuring contaminants in soil extracts and rapid measurement of herbicide and pesticide residues in food extracts.
