DNA detection physics discovery

[John Griessen]

http://www.rdmag.com/news/2015/01/photonic-crystal-nanolaser-biosensor-simplifies-dna-detection?et_cid=4361822&et_rid=479581041&location=top

Looks like Toshihiko Baba of Yokohama National Univ. found a way to sense adsorption without any markers involved, just plain old
biomolecules and super special light.

So..... that could apply to lab-on-a-chip, chemical-nose or DNA sequence detectors by noticing changes in light amplitude
and changes in light wavelength that are independent.

[John Griessen]

On 01/15/2015 05:31 PM, John Griessen wrote:
> could apply to lab-on-a-chip, chemical-nose or DNA sequence detectors

The significant thing is the scale of a sensor appears to be a zone 10 x 10 microns.
Not sure if it senses above the plane of the photo or at the edge yet.

It can detect changes to anything in that small zone, so thousands of them can be arrayed, (maybe),
and they can be as selective as whatever you can glue to their surface. The surface can be
some thin zircon oxide, which sounds fairly inert, and charge effects change the light intensity
sensed.

So, it's an analog to Jeswin's suggestion of using PCR/electrophoresis as the "readout" for
a specific primer. But it could do "reads" per second if there was some way to get the adsorbed
molecules off quickly, then reread...



http://www.aip.org/publishing/journal-highlights/photonic-crystal-nanolaser-biosensor-simplifies-dna-detection

Here's the full text article about it:

http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/journal/apl/106/2/10.1063/1.4904481