Programme
14.30 – 14.50 Sam Davies, Yetisen Group – Optical Sensors for Biomarker Monitoring
14.50 – 15.10 Dr Ignacio Moya, Polizzi Group – Biosensors to detect RNA integrity
15.10 – 16.10 – Lecture from Dr Ruchi Gupta
16.10 – 17.00 – Drinks reception in the CPSE Common room (Roderic Hill C615)
Abstract
I will discuss some of the research undertaken in my group on label-free optical biosensors.Firstly, I will discuss our work on the integration of an electrophoresis method, pH junction stacking, with leaky waveguide (LW) detection (Figure 1) for the measurement of analytes at picomolar (pM) levels in a few minutes [1]. This is an advance over the previous work [2, 3] in that LW is an all-dielectric structure making its integration with electrophoresis feasible, while still being simple to fabricate by methods such as spin coating.
Figure 1: Electrophoresis integrated with leaky waveguide detection
I will then discuss a volume grating sensor, which was fabricated using a photofunctionalisable hydrogel synthesized in my group (Figure 2) [4]. High aspect ratio structures are difficult to fabricate in soft materials, but the approach allowed us to fabricate gratings with aspect ratio of ~4.6. I will present some results on the application of the developed volume hydrogel grating for real-time sensing of an exemplar analytes such as pH and proteins.
Figure 2: Volume grating fabricated using photofunctionalisable hydrogel
References:
1. Goddard N.J. and Gupta R., Speed and Sensitivity − Electrophoretic Preconcentration with Leaky Waveguide Detection in Microchannels, Submitted.
2. Escobedo, C., Brolo, A.G., Gordon, R., Sinton, D., “Optofluidic Concentration: Plasmonic Nanostructure as Concentrator and Sensor” Nano Letters, 2012, 12, 1592.
3. Barik, A., Otto, L.M., Yoo, D., Jose, J., Johnson, T.W., Oh, W.-H., “Dielectrophoresis-Enhanced Plasmonic Sensing with Gold Nanohole Arrays” Nano Letters, 2014, 14, 2006.
4. Pal, A.K., Labella, E., Goddard N.J. and Gupta R., Photofunctionalisable Hydrogel for Fabricating Volume Optical Diffractive Sensors, Submitted.
Biography
Dr Ruchi Gupta is a Senior Lecturer and Birmingham Fellow in the School of Chemistry at the University of Birmingham. Previously, she was a Lecturer in Analytical Science at the University of Hull. Dr Gupta attended Nanyang Technological University, Singapore for her undergraduate studies in Electronics and Electrical Engineering on a prestigious SIA-NOL scholarship. She then completed her MASc in Engineering Physics at McMaster University (Canada) where she developed the basic components of generic and programmable microfluidics. This was followed by a PhD and RAEng Enterprise Fellowship at the University of Manchester, UK.