FirePlex® particle technology
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Find out how FirePlex particle technology works with your flow cytometer or high content imager to allow highly sensitive, true multiplexed analysis.
Capabilities of FirePlex particles
FirePlex® particles are made from a porous bio-inert hydrogel that allows target capture throughout the 3D volume. FirePlex particle technology provides >100x more binding sites per particle, compared to the leading bead-based platform. For nucleic acid capture and detection, this provides an additional two logs of dynamic range and a ~75x increase in sensitivity.
FirePlex® particle technology allows the recognition of up to 70 distinct codes, thus making it possible to perform 70-plex assays.
Structure of FirePlex particles
FirePlex particle technology contains three distinct functional regions, each separated from the other by inert spacer regions, minimizing spectral spill (Figure 1).
- The two end regions contain differing fluorescence intensities to create 70 distinct fluorescent barcodes.
- The central analyte quantification region contains pre-bound probes or capture antibodies, in an area spatially distinct from the coding region. This spatial difference eliminates any spectral spill from the coding into the analyte detection.
Figure 1. FirePlex unique particle structure and decoding.
Analysis of FirePlex assays
FirePlex is designed to work on a range of flow cytometers and high content imagers. To decode and analyze the data, we have designed the simple, free to download FirePlex Analysis Workbench software. This takes events from the three regions of the particles and stitches them back together into a single event, identifying which probe or analyte is bound to that coded particle, giving the amount of bound target miRNA or protein analyte.
If you're interested in FirePlex immunoassays and want to find out more, get in touch with us.