Academic labs studying infection or commensals in the context of immune-mediated diseases and clinical labs wanting broad panels for diagnosing or monitoring infections use it.

It is applied when large sets of patients’ sera need to be screened for numerous microbial antigen targets (e.g., viruses, commensals) in vaccine R&D or infection surveillance.

It is used by applying “array” or “Virscan-like” chips that contain many microbial antigens. Serum is incubated on the chip, and an automated readout detects binding signals to each antigen, giving a broad infection and commensal “antibody fingerprint.”

The microarray is spotted or synthesized with peptides/proteins representing microbial antigens. Patient antibodies (IgG, IgA, IgE, etc.) in serum bind to matching antigens, measured by a labelled secondary antibody. Software quantifies reactivity for each antigen across the array.