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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2019 Sep 26.
Published in final edited form as: ACS Appl Mater Interfaces. 2018 Sep 11;10(38):31845–31849. doi: 10.1021/acsami.8b01377

Figure 1.

Figure 1.

Schematic of nanoparticle-based proximity ligation assay (NP-PLA). (A) In traditional immuno-PCR (iPCR), a PCR-amplifiable template oligo is directly used as the reporter. Non-specifically bound oligos are PCR amplifiable, resulting in nonspecific background signal. (B) In NP-PLA, avidin-coated nanoparticles serve as reporters. The avidin nanoparticles bring the two split parts (biotinylated oligo-A and biotinylated oligo-B) of the PCR template and the biotinylated bridge oligo-C into proximity. Oligo-A and oligo-B are then ligated, with the resulting oligomer serving as the PCR template. Any non-specifically bound oligos in NP-PLA cannot be ligated into a PCR-amplifiable template, and nonspecific background is significantly decreased.