Massively parallel measurements of molecular interaction kinetics on a microfluidic platform

Quantitative biology requires quantitative data. No high-throughput technologies exist capable of obtaining several hundred independent kinetic binding measurements in a single experiment. We present an integrated microfluidic device (k-MITOMI) for the simultaneous kinetic characterization of 768 biomolecular interactions. We applied k-MITOMI to the kinetic analysis of transcription factor (TF)-DNA interactions, measuring the detailed kinetic landscapes of the mouse TF Zif268, and the yeast TFs Tye7p, Yox1p, and Tbf1p. We demonstrated the integrated nature of k-MITOMI by expressing, purifying, and characterizing 27 additional yeast transcription factors in parallel on a single device. Overall, we obtained 2,388 association and dissociation curves of 223 unique molecular interactions with equilibrium dissociation constants ranging from 2 x 10(-6) M to 2x 10(-9) M, and dissociation rate constants of approximately 6 s(-1) to 8.5 x 10(-3) s(-1). Association rate constants were uniform across 3 TF families, ranging from 3.7 x 10(6) M-1 s(-1) to 9.6 x 10(7) M-1 s(-1), and are well below the diffusion limit. We expect that k-MITOMI will contribute to our quantitative understanding of biological systems and accelerate the development and characterization of engineered systems.