A Methodology for Investigating Protein Adhesion and Adsorption to Microarrayed Combinatorial Polymers

Here, we report the use of fluorescently labelled proteins to study protein adsorption to microarrayed synthetic polymers for the first time, indicating that this method is appropriate for the study of protein adsorption on these arrays. To investigate protein adhesion directly we use atomic force microscopy (AFM) to measure the force of adhesion between a protein-coated probe and the arrayed polymers. Both approaches show promise as methods for screening protein interactions with polymers in a microarray format. Comparison of these very different measures of protein–surface interactions indicate a good correlation.