Time-resolved fluorometry: an overview of the labels and core technologies for drug screening applications

Time-resolved fluorometry (TRF) with lanthanide chelate labels is a well-established technology in diagnostics. Recently, TRF has attracted great interest as a tool for application in a range of assay formats in drug screening. The advent of highly fluorescent lanthanide chelates has made it possible to develop a wide variety of highly sensitive TRF-based assay technologies, both heterogeneous and homogeneous. In addition, the ability of TRF technology to combine temporal resolution with high spatial resolution opens up the possibility of assay configurations with features such as miniaturization, multilabel or multiparametric analysis and greatly improved sample throughput.