AUTOMATION OF ENVIRONMENTAL ELISAS

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.