ELISAs offer advantages over Western blot analyses and other methods, such as increased sensitivity, decreased assay variability, increased efficiency, and decreased cost.
As in prior investigations, this study permitted adjunctive armodafinil or adjunctive placebo to be combined with a broad array of ongoing bipolar disorder maintenance treatments, in conformity with the availability of many such choices in clinical practice, providing the strength of increased generalizability, albeit with the potential limitation of decreased assay sensitivity.
Inhibitors often decrease assay sensitivity or even lead to false-negative results.
Furthermore, the coelenterazine substrate is prone to chemical instability and high autoluminescence background, properties that make sample handling difficult and decrease assay sensitivity.
For the ERα-binding assay, we preferred to use a tracer concentration which is not too high, because high tracer concentrations make it necessary to use high concentrations of test compounds as well in order to displace the tracer from the receptor, which results in a decreased assay sensitivity.
The lack of a significant effect on 12-week confirmed disability progression in CONFIRM may have been related to the lower rate of disability progression in the placebo group in CONFIRM compared with DEFINE, which contributed to decreased assay sensitivity of the study.
In these applications, the primary goal is that of optimizing probe sets and hybridization conditions to maximize the specificity of species-specific probe/target interactions, possibly at the expense of decreased assay sensitivity and thus the majority of microarrays used for species identification are oligonucleotide-based.
This also decreases the assay time considerably.
Coupling procedures for the synthesis of antibody-enzyme conjugates require particularly high yields, since any unlabeled antibody fraction decreases the assay sensitivity, especially because it is difficult to purify the resulting coupling product from unmodified antibody.
