MULTIPLE TIME-AUTOCORRELATION FOR REAL-TIME ANALYSIS OF MINIATURIZED MICROARRAYS

Ever-growing need for environmental monitoring requires a simple, portable, rapid and cheap bio-sensing platform. The objective of this research is to develop and optimize a technique that merges miniaturization with microfluidics and a software-based approach that would allow rapid real-time detection of microarrays without long incubation time and washing step. By monitoring the diffusion coefficient of target molecules during incubation stage of microarray, we can detect the bimolecular interactions real-time, because the diffusion coefficient of the target molecules will be low above the immobilized capture molecule spots due to the bimolecular interaction, and high in the capture molecule free areas. In this project we approach the aforementioned objective by a new software based Fluorescence Correlation Spectroscopy (FCS) method. We have written an algorithm that calculates the autocorrelation function (time) of each pixels form stack of images and creates a representative image whose intensity profile correlates with the diffusion coefficient of the target molecules. We have tested the algorithm and the results are encouraging. We are able to achieve detection in short time. Therefore we would like further improve and optimize the method to achieve rapid and sensitive detection.