Autoimmune diseases affect an estimated 3-5% of the total population, with the highest prevalence in the elderly and in females. The common feature in this group of diseases is the presence of autoantibodies, and the pattern of antibodies present is used for distinguishing among the disorders in this group. A multiplex proteome array system has been developed in UTSW microarray core facility, which contains about 70 most popular autoantigens defined in different autoimmune diseases and these autoantigens were printed in duplicate on nitrocellulose coated glass slides. Each slide contains 8 or 16 sections of the same array and allows simultaneously testing 8-16 samples on one slide. Our multiplex autoantigen array system has been tested extensively for detecting autoantibody profiles from hundreds of human and mouse samples with different autoimmune diseases (e.g., SLE, MS, RA) with high specificity and sensitivity. With this system, one can easily screening up to 64 samples on more than 70 autoantibodies within 3 hours, and it only requires 1ul of samples (serum or other body fluid). Now we are providing service and products for high-throughput, large-scale screening of autoantibody profiles using our multiplex autoantigen proteome array system.
