Electrokinetic Mixing in Microplates and its Applications to Kinase and ELISA-Assay Type Reactions

While 384 well-plate format is still commonly used by the Biomolecular community, miniaturized formats (1536 and 3456 well-plates) are gaining in popularity, due to promise of higher throughput and lower reagent consumption. However, decrease in reagent volume in such miniaturized formats leads to issues of accuracy and sensitivity caused by incomplete mixing and the mechanical stirring methods satisfactory used for 384 well-plate formats, give poor mixing with lower volumes. Here we present results obtained in 1536-well and 3456-well plates equipped with electrodes where we induced fluid flow by the action of electromagnetic fields. Improvement in two types of reactions are obtained, related to ELISA-type assays and kinase-based assays. For example, in the kinase reaction, we show that, when using the electrode-enabled mixing technology, an 8 minutes protocol in 1536-well plate format is equivalent in accuracy to a 90 minutes protocol in standard 96-well plate format mixed using an orbital shaker. This mixing technology is scalable, due to modern developments in electrode manufacturing and can be used in super-high throughput screening formats, such as 10000-well or droplets.