Miniaturisierte Sensoren basierend auf Oberflächenplasmonenresonanz, Chancen und Herausforderungen
(2021)
Derzeit gibt es zahlreiche Bereiche, wie Umwelt Monitoring und zivile Infrastruktur in denen geeignete Sensoren für die Überwachung der Systeme fehlen. SPR-basierte Sensoren haben das Potential diese Lücke zu schließen. Um für den Einsatz in der Umwelt tauglich zu werden, müssen die Sensoren noch robuster werden. Hier wird eine mögliche Lösung gezeigt.
The analysis of surface water, groundwater, drinking water as well as sewage is important to get information about the contamination of the water cycle. Currently, these time-consuming investigations require special equipment, like for example hyphenated mass spectrometry. Surface plasmon resonance (SPR) is a faster alternative as it is highly sensitive to changes in the dielectric medium next to a thin metal layer and makes it a quasi-universal detector. Therefore, and due to the labelfree nature, SPR is a widely used sensing tool for real‐time monitoring of molecular interactions of various analytes. SPR imaging (SPRi) has several advantages to standard surface plasmon resonance, as it allows to observe many analytes in parallel as well as the integration of referencing technologies. However, the homogenous illumination of a large area (several millimeters) with a small light source is challenging and demands new approaches. Allopurinol, a drug used to lower the blood concentration of urate and hence decrease the affection of gout, gets metabolized to oxipurinol in the body and dropped out almost entirely by urinary excretion. After wastewater treatment, concentrations of oxipurinol up to 21.7 μg•L-1 are detected. Further tracking of oxipurinol in the urban water cycle showed its presence in rivers and streams or even in groundwater. Therefore, the high biological stability of oxipurinol allows this molecule to be used as a marker for domestic wastewater in the environment. For the detection of oxipurinol by SPR graphene was used as receptive layer, as the analyte can bind via π-stacking to this surface. An SPRi technique was developed and compared to conventional SPR system for the detection of oxipurinol.
Forschungsbericht 2016
(2016)
We describe how to build a homogeneous light source for Surface Plasmon Resonance Imaging (SPRi) which mainly finds its applications in pharmaceutical screening and biotechnology so far. SPR spectroscopy is a label-free, non-destructive and highly sensitive measurement principle for detecting changes in the refractive index in close vicinity of a gold surface. A transfer of this technology to a miniaturized sensor will broaden the range of possible applications. Commercial SPR assays are mainly working with a small number of sensing spots. In contrast, the SPR imaging system shown here will allow the use of an array of many sensing spots. In combination with chemical receptors designed as an artificial nose or an electronic tongue, the simultaneous detection of many analytes is envisioned. So far, lasers or other inhomogeneous light sources were used to illuminate the sensing surface, which is decreasing the systems sensitivity. We show a compact ( 300mm2) homogeneous top hat profile. The combination of a high bit-resolution camera with our new light source enables a reflectivity based surface plasmon resonance imaging system with a high refractive index unit (RIU) resolution.