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Diffraction bar-codes as high capacity optical microtags for chemical and biological applications

Diffraction bar-codes as high capacity optical microtags for chemical and biological applications
Diffraction bar-codes as high capacity optical microtags for chemical and biological applications
The rapid advances in high throughput screening, combinatorial chemistry, genomic and proteomic sciences have stimulated dramatic development of new encoding strategies for bead-based assays. Several optical encoding methods are currently used in these applications, including fluorescence, Raman and magnetic tagging on microbeads. Here we describe a new method for encoding small beads which allows for non-contact reading and offer potentially millions of distinguishable tags. The tagging technique is based on fabricating a nano-structured pattern on the surface of the particle, which is only a few microns in size, read by detecting the spatial distribution of laser light diffracted by the tag. In the simplest implementation, the pattern is no more than a miniature diffraction grating, where information is coded in the pitch or spatial dimensions of the grating, read by detecting the angle of the diffracted orders. A huge increase in capacity has been achieved by using a number of superimposed gratings with different pitch and by employing two dimensional gratings. Distinguishing of tens of thousands of tags has been demonstrated on a chromium-on-glass chip library of 50 µm long tags. The technique has also been proved with biologically compatible gratings manufactured on metal nanoparticle doped SU8 photo-polymer.
Birtwell, S.
b1d014b6-4286-49cf-925d-c33b409e4147
Galitonov, G.S.
c1bff27b-c0f3-43b1-b131-a5a3f4164b59
Whitton, A.
0ad451b5-751e-447e-995f-0809cd92adba
Morgan, H.
de00d59f-a5a2-48c4-a99a-1d5dd7854174
Zheludev, N.
32fb6af7-97e4-4d11-bca6-805745e40cc6
Birtwell, S.
b1d014b6-4286-49cf-925d-c33b409e4147
Galitonov, G.S.
c1bff27b-c0f3-43b1-b131-a5a3f4164b59
Whitton, A.
0ad451b5-751e-447e-995f-0809cd92adba
Morgan, H.
de00d59f-a5a2-48c4-a99a-1d5dd7854174
Zheludev, N.
32fb6af7-97e4-4d11-bca6-805745e40cc6

Birtwell, S., Galitonov, G.S., Whitton, A., Morgan, H. and Zheludev, N. (2006) Diffraction bar-codes as high capacity optical microtags for chemical and biological applications. QEP-17 at Photon06, Manchester, UK. 03 - 06 Sep 2006.

Record type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)

Abstract

The rapid advances in high throughput screening, combinatorial chemistry, genomic and proteomic sciences have stimulated dramatic development of new encoding strategies for bead-based assays. Several optical encoding methods are currently used in these applications, including fluorescence, Raman and magnetic tagging on microbeads. Here we describe a new method for encoding small beads which allows for non-contact reading and offer potentially millions of distinguishable tags. The tagging technique is based on fabricating a nano-structured pattern on the surface of the particle, which is only a few microns in size, read by detecting the spatial distribution of laser light diffracted by the tag. In the simplest implementation, the pattern is no more than a miniature diffraction grating, where information is coded in the pitch or spatial dimensions of the grating, read by detecting the angle of the diffracted orders. A huge increase in capacity has been achieved by using a number of superimposed gratings with different pitch and by employing two dimensional gratings. Distinguishing of tens of thousands of tags has been demonstrated on a chromium-on-glass chip library of 50 µm long tags. The technique has also been proved with biologically compatible gratings manufactured on metal nanoparticle doped SU8 photo-polymer.

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More information

Published date: September 2006
Venue - Dates: QEP-17 at Photon06, Manchester, UK, 2006-09-03 - 2006-09-06

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 57758
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/57758
PURE UUID: 74dc1ceb-c802-473a-ac3f-e608892df92b
ORCID for H. Morgan: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0003-4850-5676
ORCID for N. Zheludev: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0002-1013-6636

Catalogue record

Date deposited: 11 Aug 2008
Last modified: 12 Dec 2021 03:25

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Contributors

Author: S. Birtwell
Author: G.S. Galitonov
Author: A. Whitton
Author: H. Morgan ORCID iD
Author: N. Zheludev ORCID iD

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