High Frequency QCM Flow cell with Enhanced Accuracy for Liquid and Biochemical Sensing

Description

The quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) has been proven to be a highly sensitive mass detector which found its way into biomedical sciences. The measuring technique is ideally suited for online detection of biological and chemical analytes and gets along without labelling them. Most biosensing systems based on thickness shear mode resonators work with resonance frequencies between 5 and 20 MHz and use commercially available flow cells. The utilisation of high frequency fundamental (HFF) quartz resonators, with resonance frequencies up to 200 MHz, could further improve the sensitivity of such systems. We present a fully biocompatible flow cell, designed for HFF quartz resonators. For the development of a biosensor we solved important questions like the functionalization of the small and fragile sensor surface, the sensitive and repeatable detection of dissolved analytes and the regeneration of the sensor. The system performance is further evaluated by a number of experiments including the step-wise growth of a protein multilayer system by an alternating immobilisation of streptavidin and biotinylated immunoglobulin G, as well as the detection of specific antibody-antigen reactions.

Period	25 Mar 2009
Event title	DPG-Frühjahrstagung 2009, Dresden, Deutschland
Event type	Conference
Location	GermanyShow on map