ELISAs for pesticides and herbicides in environmental and agricultural
samples are becoming very important in screening applications [1-3].
Traditional chromatographic methods are expensive and results need lon
g turnaround times, making them incompatible with rapid on-site decisi
on making. ELISA methods have been shown to meet or exceed the perform
ance of gas chromatography-they, offer rapid low-cost analysis, thereb
y increasing the frequency of sampling and enhancing data quality. Aut
omated ELISA workstations allow the full benefit of these kits to be r
ealized. Sample preparation, reagent pipetting, incubation, and photom
etric can be performed without user intervention. Reliability, is incr
eased through the elimination of operator error, better accuracy and p
recision, and often higher speed. Much larger batch sites are oossible
and these systems can provide sample tracking with report generation
for documentation requirements. In this paper the manual Procedures an
d ELISA methods are compared and some critical aspects of automating t
hese ELISA kits are discussed.