No Blood , now the Biochip will measure your Glucose - Gen ‘X’ Glucose Test
A new sensor has been prepared by researchers at Brown university that checks the glucose levels in saliva instead of blood. Around 26 million Americans suffer from diabetes and drawing blood is the only method to check glucose levels. It is invasive in nature and painful too.
This technique utilizes convergence of nanotechnology and surface plasmonics, which explores the interaction of electrons and photons. Researchers at Brown university etched thousands of plasmonic interferometers onto a biochip, the size of a fingernail and measured the concentration of glucose in water. Their findings went ahead to show that the biochip can be used to detect glucose levels in human saliva too. The concentration of glucose in saliva is around 100 times less than that in blood. This goes to show that plasmonic interferometers can be used to detect biological molecules with a footprint about 10 times smaller.
Domenico Pacifi, the assistant professor of engineering and lead author of the paper says that this technique can be used to detect other molecules and all of them at once, in parallel, using the same chip.
In order to create the sensor, researcher carved a slit about 100 nanometers wide and etched two 200 nanometer wide grooves on the other side of the slit. The slit captures incoming photons and confine them while the grooves scatter the incoming photons that interact with the electrons that gather at the surface of the metal. These interactions create a surface plasmon polariton which moves along the sensor’s surface until they encounter the photons in the slit. The presence of an analyte on the sensor surface generates a change in the relative phase difference between the two surface plasmon waves, which in turn causes a change in the light intensity.
The engineers later learned that they could vary the phase shift for an interferometer by changing the distance between the grooves and the slit. It could be possible to carry out the screening of multiple biomarkers by using this biochips for individual patients, all at once and in parallel. The scientists next aim to build the biochips for glucose and other materials. “The proposed approach will enable very high throughput detection of environmentally and biologically relevant analytes in an extremely compact design. We can do it with a sensitivity that rivals modern day technology”, said Pacifi.
-Revised article of Biotec
