WOLFEChip: Wholly-Integrated Optofluidic Laser-Induced Fluorescence Electrophoresis Chip

In this Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) effort, Leiden Measurement Technology LLC (LMT) proposes to design and build the Wholly-integrated Optofluidic Laser-induced Fluorescence Electrophoresis Chip (WOLFEChip) System, a microchip capillary electrophoresis (MCE) system using a miniaturized optofluidic approach for packaging all critical optical elements necessary for laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) on-chip. WOLFEChip uses cutting-edge laser micromachining to fabricate fully-three-dimensional optical elements that focus excitation laser light into a MCE microchannel to excite fluorescence. The fluorescence emission is collected using custom-designed high-numerical aperture collection optics immune to misalignment of the chip up to 1-mm. This improves on current and past implementations of MCE-LIF by (1) greatly miniaturizing the optical elements which comprise a significant amount of space in MCE-LIF systems; (2) making the entire LIF optical system monolithic and immune to misalignment which greatly enhances the vibration-resistance of the entire system; (3) making the system immune to operator-to-operator variations caused by the periodic need to carefully align traditional MCE-LIF systems; and (4) greatly reducing measured stray light and thereby potentially increasing the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the MCE-LIF system by employing right-angle excitation/emission optical geometries and through the use of high-quality fluorescence-free fused silica. LMT will deliver a complete MCE-LIF system featuring a refined WOLFEChip design created in Phase I.