Towards magnetic suspension assay technology

Abstract

In this study micromagnetic simulations are used to evaluate two novel approaches of magnetically tagging biomolecules in high-throughput biological assays. Comparisons are made between a simple magnetic moment-based tagging system, where the total magnetic moment of each microscopic tag encodes the identity of an attached biomolecule, and a multibit tagging system, where each tag is comprised of multiple magnetic binary bits. We show that although detection of the tags using magnetoresistive sensors is feasible in both cases, the multibit technology offers over a thousand times more distinct tags than the simple moment encoded approach. The advantages of using multibit magnetic tags to label biomolecules, rather than existing optical tagging techniques, are also discussed. © 2008 American Institute of Physics.