Lawn-format assays

The expense of screening depends very much on the number of samples tested. Consequently, the density format of titer-plates has increased in recent years from 96-well up to the 9600-well format. The next big step towards miniaturization would be the complete avoidance of any container, which then results in the smallest well possible and a well-less, so-called lawn-format assay develops. This is exactly what is proposed by a number of authors (see review [47]). Screening in a lawn format does not mean avoiding any structure or arrangements. Samples are still prepared on beads, which are produced by split-mix synthesis, but the beads are arrayed directly on the well-less assay. A typical matrix applied for such biological screening is the agarose lawn. Active beads are then picked from the assay matrix and decoded for compound identification. 

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Marron, B. E., Jayawickreme, C. K., Going to the well no more lawn format assays for ultra-high-throughput screening, Curr. Opin. Chem. Biol. 2003, 7, 395—101. 

Jayawickreme CK, Sauls H, BoUo N, Ruan J, Moyer M, Burkhart W, Matron B, Rimele T, Shaffer J. Use of a cell-based, lawn format assay to rapidly screen a 442,368 bead-based peptide library. J. Pharmacol. Toxicol. Methods 1999 42 189-197. 

Jayawickreme, C.K. Sauls, H. Bolio, N. Ruan, J. Moyer, M. Burkhart, W. Marron, B. Rimele, T. Shaffer, J. Use of a Cell-based, Lawn Format Assay to Rapidly Screen a 4,442,368 Bead-based Peptide Library, J. Pharm. Tax. Meth. 42, 189-197 (1999). 

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