ADVANCED IMAGING TECHNOLOGY FOR BIOCHIP ANALYSIS

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant)The broad objective of this Fast Track project is to develop and commercialize a versatile and inexpensive CCD-based system for microarray imaging and quantification. A differentiating feature of this system will be the capability to perform time-gated imaging, which will provide the benefits of effective background suppression on certain substrates such as membranes and enhanced discrimination of multiplexed labels. The primary objectives of this phase I study will be to quantify these benefits and to assess the value of these benefits to end users and hence to assess technical feasibility and to determine whether the commercial development of a time-gated imaging system is justified. Background suppression by time-gated imaging requires the use of specific labels, and its benefits will be most apparent on certain substrates. Thus, the system will be tested with long-lifetime fluorescent reagents on nylon membranes. This combination is expected to provide excellent performance for target applications. It is also essential that the system should be capable of the simultaneous imaging of two labels. This can be accomplished with spectral filtering alone, but we will investigate whether time resolved imaging significantly enhances discrimination. Because it is our objective to develop a versatile system, we will also test the system for chemiluminescent imaging. We anticipate that the proposed system will enable the use of fluorescent labels for high-sensitivity nucleic acid microarray hybridization experiments on high binding capacity membranes (e.g. nylon). These substrates are currently are limited to radioisotopic labels on macroarray formats because of high background fluorescence and the poor spatial resolution of radioisotopic detection.