Fig. 1.

Different type of lateral flow strips. The upper strip is a side view of a LF strip with a single test (T ) line and a flow-control (FC) line. The T-line is the target-specific (disease/pathogen-specific) capture zone. The FC-line is the control area that captures UCP reporter particles that have flowed past the T-line and indicate that the flow (chromatography) was successful. The LF strip with multiple T-lines can detect a limited number of different targets simultaneously in a single sample; sample and UCP reporter have to pass all capture zones. The lower strip, referred to as TransDot (Malamud et al. 2005; Corstjens et al. 2010), is a top view of a LF strip with a linear array of T-spots; all spots are localized at the same distance from the sample pad and interact with part of the sample and UCP reporter that did not have interaction with the other capture zones. TransDot is well suited for comprehensive multiplexing when it allows the use of a generic UCP conjugate (as UCP particles coated with protein A for antibody detection).