Bo Zhang, Justin A. Jarrell, Jordan V. Price, Scott M. Tabakman, Yanguang Li, Ming Gong, Guosong Hong, Ju Feng, Paul J. Utz, Hongjie Dai

High-throughput screening for interactions of peptides with a variety of antibody targets could greatly facilitate proteomic analysis for epitope mapping, enzyme profiling, drug discovery and biomarker identification. Peptide microarrays are suited for such undertaking because of their high-throughput capability. However, existing peptide microarrays lack the sensitivity needed for detecting low abundance proteins or low affinity peptide-protein interactions. This work presents a new peptide microarray platform constructed on nanostructured plasmonic gold substrates capable of metal enhanced NIR fluorescence enhancement (NIR-FE) by hundreds of folds for screening peptide-antibody interactions with ultrahigh sensitivity. Further, an integrated histone peptide and whole antigen array is developed on the same plasmonic gold chip for profiling human antibodies in the sera of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) patients, revealing that collectively a panel of biomarkers against unmodified and post-translationally modified histone peptides and several whole antigens allow more accurate differentiation of SLE patients from healthy individuals than profiling biomarkers against peptides or whole antigens alone.