omation mbers - Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening

10:30 am Tuesday, February 3 Plenary Session: A Look to the Future Room A2
Richard A. Mathies
University of California, Berkeley
307 Lewis Hall
Berkeley, California 94720
rich@zinc.cchem.berkeley.edu
Microfluidics in Your Future
Microfabricated microfluidic chemical and biochemical analysis systems have advanced tremendously since their
introduction in the early 1990’s. High-density and high throughput analyses are now routinely performed with
arrays of microreactors, microarrays and microfabricated capillary electrophoresis channels. The full exploitation
of these analysis capabilities awaits the development of nanoliter microfluidic sample preparation and handling
capabilities that are integrated with the high throughput analyzer. For example, one recent publication explored
the feasibility of integrating the entire shot-gun sequencing process on a wafer. If analogous microdevice systems
could be developed that fully integrate the sample preparation and analysis processes in, for example, sequencing,
genotyping, infectious disease detection, forensic identification, pathogen detection, and environmental monitoring,
they would drive a paradigm shift in high throughput clinical and research labs. The development and application
of such fully integrated chemical and biochemical “microprocessor” will also significantly impact point-of-care and
point-of-analysis.
11:15 am Tuesday, February 3 Plenary Session Room A2
Christopher R. Lowe
University of Cambridge
Institute of Biotechnology
Tennis Court Road
Cambridge, CB2 1QT United Kingdom
c.lowe@biotech.cam.ac.uk
The Nanophysiometer: Holographic Sensors for Drug Discovery
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Co-Author(s)
Jeff Blyth, Alex Marshall, Anthony James,
Satyamoorthy Kabilan, Felicity Sartain,
Mei-Ching Lee, Blanca Madrigal-Gonzalez,
Xiao-Ping Yang, Colin Davidson
This session will address many of the current needs in pharmaceutical discovery and promises timely and
economical solutions. There is a desire to move “high content” screening into a “high throughput” mode to
accelerate the drug discovery pipeline. In effect, this would collapse the hit-discovery and hit-to-lead steps
into one, with a potentially significant timesaving. The lecture will describe the concept and development of a
disposable “plastic” that is capable of measuring a number of metabolic parameters simultaneously in nanowells
in real-time using optical sensor technology with multiple fluidic inputs/outputs and all associated instrumentation
and software. A key aspect of the approach is the introduction of novel planar optical sensors based on using a
reflection hologram as an inexpensive, disposable, mass-producible indicator of metabolic activity. This approach
is unique in the field of chemical sensors since the hologram per se provides both the analyte-responsive polymer
and the optical interrogation and reporting transducer.
Holographic matrices have been developed which can be modified rationally in order to construct specific
response mechanisms to the target analyte. Defined polymeric matrices such as poly-vinylalcohol, poly-hydroxyeth
ylmethacrylate, poly-acrylamide and starch have been used to fabricate the holograms. Examples of the detection
of a number of analytes, including pH, ions, enzymes and metabolites will be given. These sensors have been
incorporated into a fully instrumented nanophysiometer in order to measure the growth kinetics and metabolic
activity of a number of microbial systems in real-time. This technology has the potential to revolutionize the way
modern microbial, plant and animal cell biology is conducted.