High-throughput Surface Tension Measurement - Isis Project No 757

A rapid, quantitative method for measurement of surface tension in 96-well microtitre assay plates – enables accurate, multiple sample measurements in seconds.

Marketing Opportunities

Disposable 96-well microplates are widely used for biochemical and molecular biological experiments. Fluorescent or coloured reaction products can be analysed in the plate wells with a dedicated multi-well plate spectrofluorimeter or spectrophotometer.

There are a variety of traditional methods for measuring the surface tension of aqueous solutions e.g. drop volume techniques, bubble pressure measurements and drop shape analysis techniques. There are numerous problems associated with these methods:

• They are all based on simple, single manual measurements
• They require quite large quantities of sample liquid – typically several ml
• They are slow – measurements take several minutes per sample
• They have very limited reproducibility
• Vast technical skill is required to obtain accurate measurements

The challenge to further development of this area is identification of a versatile method, which is quicker than traditional ones, able to measure multiple samples, and requires considerably less technical skill.

The Oxford Invention

The Oxford Invention provides for the first time a rapid, accurate, reproducible method for the measurement of surface tension in multi-well plates. The invention is based upon the effect of variation of reflected or transmitted light intensity as a function of the angle of incidence of light on a sample’s surface that will provide a measurement of the surface tension.

The invention has numerous commercial advantages compared to traditional methods:

• Very rapid – completes measurements in seconds
• Reproducible
• Requires very small volumes of sample liquid (0.1ml)
• Enables high throughput of samples

Patent Status

This work is the subject of granted patents in the USA (US7224470) and Europe (EP1252498 – validated in UK, France, Germany and Netherlands) and has recently been allowed in Japan. Isis would like to talk to companies interested in developing the commercial opportunity that this represents. Please contact the Technology Transfer Manager using the link below to discuss this further.

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