Aptamers as
nucleic acid affinity reagents are gaining traction in analytical applications owing to their high stability, compact size, and amenability to chemical modifications. It is highly desired to generate aptamers with different
binding affinities to meet the requirements of various applications. However,
systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment (SELEX), the
gold standard for
aptamer generation, is unable to quantitatively produce aptamers with desired
binding affinities and requires multiple rounds of selection to eliminate false positive hits. Here we introduce Pro-SELEX, a new approach for rapid discovery of aptamers with precisely defined
binding affinities that combines efficient particle display, high-performance microfluidic sorting and high-content
bioinformatics. Using the Pro-SELEX
workflow, we were able to investigate the binding performance of individual
aptamer candidates under different selective pressure in a single round of selection. Using human
myeloperoxidase (MPO) as a target, we demonstrated that aptamers with dissociation constants spanning a twenty-fold range of affinities can be identified within one round of Pro-SELEX. Our
selection strategy will have a significant
impact on the fields of biosensing and bioseparation by generating aptamers with tailored binding affinities.