| A majority of the functions in biological systems are mediated by specific interactions of cellular proteins. Such interactions also involve other biomolecules like antibodies, RNA and DNA, small molecules sometimes referred to as drugs, etc. A detailed understanding of functional proteomics necessitates the need for detection and quantification of such specific biochemical reactions with greater speed and precision. The primary biosensing technology that is employed for detecting these biological interactions optically and with good sensitivity and reproducibility is based on Surface Plasmon Resonance (SPR).;In this work, we aim at utilization of chemical signal processing techniques in microfluidic chips to produce SPR measurements with higher signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), shorter measurement times, and lower reagent volumes than those of conventional SPR systems like BIAcore, ProteOn, etc. The drawbacks of conventional methods are discussed and schemes based on signal processing in frequency domain are applied to minimize the influence of spurious signals that affect the measurement accuracy. With the choice of applied excitation signal, a 100-fold improvement in SNR has been achieved. Similarly, with alteration of signal postprocessing methodology, we have reported a 10-fold faster dual-slope method that can be employed for a variety of high-throughput applications, especially in drug-discovery industry. To further optimize the microchip that uses less than a hundred nanoliter of reagent volume for bio-characterization. Discrete liquid droplets are synthesized in an ordered fashion to carry out the bioreaction that conventionally utilizes reagent volumes ranging from a few hundred microliters to a few milliliters. |
