Highly-Efficient and Compact Wave Guide Scanner Capable of Monitoring Microarray Hybridization Kinetics

Institute For Systems Biology, Seattle WA

Investigators

Abstract

This award supports the development of a DNA-array scanner that detects fluorescence signals by means of a novel wave guide collector. The wave guide will collect light trapped inside the array substrate by total internal reflection (TIR). The proposed scanner combines the best properties of various alternative scanner designs, while avoiding some significant disadvantages. The use of orthogonal illumination will result in low background levels and improved signal-to-noise in comparison to existing commercial instruments. The light collection optics allow addition of a temperature kinetics module which will permit use of hybridization conditions that greatly increase binding specificity. The use of DNA array hybridization has been widely adopted by biologists and biomedical researchers as a technique for detection of mutations in DNA and for monitoring of gene expression. Commercially available instruments for scanning arrays are relatively complex devices based on the same optics used in confocal microscopes, are expensive to manufacture and are unsuited to the real-time measurement of hybridization kinetics. The TIR design is simple, compact, requires little alignment and can be manufactured at low cost. Scanners with TIR collection will make possible a new generation of versatile laboratory instruments for hybridization array quantification with improved accuracy and speed.