PPT Slide
Antibody chemistry and immunoassays represent the opposite of this approach. While a single antibody assay may be far less expensive than an analytical instrument, the assay has become so specific that huge batteries of such assays must be assembled in order to measure many analytes of interest. Often the assay kit, costing a few hundred dollars, can be used only once. In many ways much of analytical instrumentation has also become this specific (witness the arrival of pentaquadrupole mass spectrometers with high performance liquid chromatographic inputs and interchangeable electrospray or fast atom bombardment or matrix-assisted laser desorption interfaces).