Objective
The aim of this project is to develop a portable biosensor microsystem able to detect hybridisation of nucleic acids with sensitivity to distinguish single base substitutions, deletions and insertions. It will be mainly applied to studies of comparative expression analysis and identification of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in human genes candidates to disease.
The biosensor microsystem will consist of:
i) an array of 20 microcantilevers,
ii) an opticaldetection system of the cantilever motion, and
iii) a polymer microfluidic system.
The hybrid integration of the DNA biochip proposed, in which the array, detector and fluid transport are miniaturized and integrated into a single unit will be the first attempt in the integration of a nanobiodevice.
Objectives:
The main objective of the Optonanogen proposal is to develop a portable biosensor microsystem able to detect single nucleotide variations in human genes.
The biosensor microsystem will consist of:
i) an array of 20 microcantilevers produced by standard silicon micromechanical technology,
ii) an optical detection system capable of measuring the cantilever movement (lasers and photodetectors).
The array of lasers (VSCELs) will be fabricated by Molecular Beam Epitaxy of semiconductor compounds. The array of photodetectors will be integrated with their corresponding amplifier and signal processing circuits, after design and fabrication of the CMOS circuitry and
iii) a polymer microfluidic system will be developed for reagents delivery to the biosensor.
Work description:
The work program, in order to obtain the biosensor microsystem, can be grouped as follows:
1. Fabrication of an array of 20 microcantilevers, which will be obtained using standard silicon micromachining technology. The cantilever dimensions will be choose in order to have a sensitive nanomechanical response and a small sensor area.
2. Development of a self-assembly chemistry which will allow to address DNA immobilization at the nanometer-scale level on one side of the cantilever array.
3. A polymer microfluidic header will be developed and integrated with the cantilever array. The microfluidic header will incorporate flow channels to allow the delivery of reagents to the cantilevers, and subsequent removal to waste.
4. Development of an optical detection subsystem, which must follow strictly the parallelism of the cantilevers and the microfluidics sub-units. A monolithic array of 20 VCSELs (Vertical Cavity Surface Emission Lasers) will be used as optical sources. These devices will be fabricated by molecular beam epitaxy.
5. For the detection of the displacement of the laser beam reflected off the cantilever backside, an array of 20 segmented photodetectors, integrated with their respective amplifier and signal processing circuits, will be designed and fabricated using IC silicon technology.
6. Final integration will be performed by incorporating the microfluidic header into a package that integrates the optical source, photodetectors and CMOS control electronics. Testing of the device will be performed before and after packaging.
Milestones:
1. Fabrication of chips of arrays of 20 cantilevers
2. Microfluidic header with common fluid path and integrated cantilever array
3. Optoelectronic subsystem for the biosensor microsystem (laser emitters, CMOSelectronics and photodetectors).
4. Robust method for coupling oligonucleotide probes to the microcantilever arraysurfaces
5. Final integrated biosensor microsystem with high performance.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringelectronic engineeringsensorsbiosensors
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringelectronic engineeringsensorsoptical sensors
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringelectronic engineeringsignal processing
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesgeneticsnucleotides
- natural sciencesphysical sciencesopticslaser physics
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Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
CSC - Cost-sharing contractsCoordinator
28006 MADRID
Spain