Due to their high surface roughness, conventional white nitrocellulose films scatter and reflect large amounts of excitation and emission light during the fluorescence detection in the microarray scanner.
To overcome this problem, a new process has been developed to generate black membranes that absorb the scattered light, significantly reducing the background auto-fluorescence and thus offering a very low and homogenous auto-fluorescence to achieve a significantly improved dynamic range.
Nevertheless, conventional white nitrocellulose films continue to be the dominant surface for many protein microarray applications because the claims above have not proved relevant to end user requirements.
A method for protein quantitation on nitrocellulose coated glass slides uses near-IR fluorescent detection with quantum dots.
Near IR detection probes are excited and read at emission wavelengths outside the range of nitrocellulose fluorescence.