Design and Performance of a Portable and Multichannel SPR Device

Abstract

A portable multichannel surface plasmon resonance (SPR) biosensor device is presented in this study. As an optical biosensor device, the core component of its light path is a semi-cylindrical prism, which is used as the coupling unit for the excitation of the SPR phenomena. Based on this prism, a wedge-shaped incident light beam including a continuous angle range (10°) is chosen to replace the commonly-used parallel light beam in traditional SPR devices, in which the incident angle is adjusted by a sophisticated mechanical system. Thus, complicated, cumbersome, and costly mechanical structures can be avoided in this design. Furthermore, the selection of a small and high-stability semiconductor laser and matrix CCD detector as well as a microfluidic system aids in the realization of a miniaturized and multichannel device. Several different samples were used to test the performance of this new device. For ethanol with different concentrations, the sensing response was of good linear relativity with the concentration (Y = 3.17143X + 2.81518, R2 = 0.97661). Mouse IgG and goat anti-mouse IgG were used as biological samples for immunological analysis, and BSA as the control group. Good specific recognition between mouse IgG and goat anti-mouse IgG has been achieved. The detection limit of antibody to antigen coated on the sensing surface was about 25 mg/L without surface modification.

Thermotropic Liquid Crystal-Assisted Chemical and Biological Sensors

“…Currently, most approaches to thermotropic LC-based sensing rely on the diffusion of target analytes through the bulk of a sub-phase to the aqueous/LC interface. Early research on surface plasmon resonance (SPR) biosensors faced similar limitations but as the interfacial phenomena became better understood, attention turned to designing micro-arrays [ 81 ] and flow-cells [ 82 , 83 ] to further increase the limits of detection (LOD) and decrease the amount of samples required for experiments. The work of Lynn et al proposes a simple flow-cell design which could also be used in chemical and biological sensors based on thermotropic LC films [ 82 ].…”

“…While non-specific LC-based sensor studies are interesting and insightful, “real life” applications require highly-specific LC assisted platforms for selective sensing of analytes. Further, LC-based solutions must offer advantages compared to the currently popular specific sensor platforms such as based on surface plasmon resonance (SPR) [ 81 ], amperometric immunosensors [ 83 ], enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISA) and others [ 18 , 28 ]. LC-based sensor design should benefit from principles utilized in well-established techniques, as well as implement new approaches based on accumulated knowledge from fundamental research on various specific interactions between biological molecules [ 114 , 115 , 116 ].…”

Realization of Low-Cost Multichannel Surface Plasmon Resonance Based Optical Transducer

“…The high sensitivity of the resonance condition to the change in the surrounding refractive index (RI) has enabled SPR systems to be used in various applications such as detection of harmful gases in environment [1], determination of antibiotics in water [2], detection of protein binding [3], detection of heavy metal ions in water [4], and detection of hepatitis B (as biosensor) [5]. The development of low-cost and portable SPR systems for sensing applications has been demonstrated by many researchers based on the Kretschmann configuration [4][5][6], Otto configuration [7], diffractive optical coupling (DOC) [8], edge coupling for optical fibers [9], and also edge coupling to SPR chips in BU-SPR configuration as it is proposed earlier by the authors [10] . The SPR signal detection can be done through intensity and angular modulation technique, which employs a photo detectors (with moving parts) or webcam for the SPR detection [11,12].…”

Surface Plasmon Resonance technology to assess biological interactions

“…A new frontier in this ield is the realization of a miniaturized and multichannel, portable SPR devices [37].…”