Development of a Photonic Crystal Biosensor
Quantitative measurements on biomolecular affinity and binding kinetics are essential to gain insight into fundamental biological processes and to serve as the basis for disease diagnoses and drug discoveries. There is therefore an increasing demand of biosensors for sensitive, accurate and high throughput assays of critical biomolecular interactions. For measurements of small molecules and/or at low concentrations, biomolecular detection usually requires labeling (such as fluorescent tags). However, fluorescence based biosensing has certain limitations, because the conjugation of the fluorescence tags may alter or inhibit the functionality of the target molecules. Thus, tremendous effort has been devoted in recent years to the development of label-free detection techniques for monitoring the binding of analytes in their natural forms. Despite the fact that a variety of label-free biosensors have been invented, it is still challenging for real-time, label-free detection of small molecules due to limited sensitivity; one of the biggest technical issues encountered in most label-free methods.
This project is to address the challenging issues for the unmet demand of label-free biosensors.
Requirements
- none
