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* Center for Studies in Physics and Biology, Rockefeller University, New York, New York 10021; and
Microparticle Photophysics Lab (MP3L), Polytechnic University, Brooklyn, New York 11201
Correspondence: Address reprint requests to Frank Vollmer, E-mail: vollmef{at}rockefeller.edu.
| ABSTRACT |
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| INTRODUCTION |
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Gene chips provide a means for high-throughput DNA screening using oligonucleotide arrays. Although already commercialized, this new technology still faces important challenges. The need for target labeling can change the relative levels of targets originally present. Acquisition and analysis of the fluorescent image is technically involved and limits the use of the DNA chip technology as the analytic part of a small, portable, and robust lab-on-a-chip device.
Biosensors most frequently used for label-free DNA detection are based on optical methods (Baird and Myszka, 2001
; Rich and Myszka, 2002
) such as highly sensitive interferometric devices (Li et al., 2003
; Lin et al., 1997
) and surface plasmon resonance sensors (SPR) which are the most prominent ones (Bates et al., 2002
; Bianchi et al., 1997
; Jensen et al., 1997
; Malmqvist, 1993
; Minunni et al., 2001
; Persson et al., 1997
). The SPR technique with a detection limit >10 pg/mm2 mass loading is very sensitive (Karlsson and Stahlberg, 1995
) and allows real-time detection of biomolecular interactions. The instrumentation, however, is of considerable size and the ability for multiplexed measurements is limited.
We present a novel, spectroscopic detection principle, which combines the advantages of label-free, high-sensitivity DNA quantification with the capability for multiplexed measurements on a simple platform. As compared to existing optical biosensors (such as SPR biosensors) where the light is passed through the sample only once, we demonstrate the use of optical resonances for quantitative DNA measurements. Optical resonances allow the light to interact with an analyte molecule several thousand times, thus increasing the ultimate detection limit by several orders of magnitude as compared to single-pass techniques. Indeed, we are able to demonstrate a sensitivity that is greater than that of commercially available SPR devices.
We excite optical resonances in dielectric microspheres, which are the ideal choice for an optical cavity because of their ability to confine light over longest time periods (high-Q) in a small volume (Collot et al., 1993
; Gorodetsky et al., 1996
). It has been estimated that a single macromolecule can lead to a detectable perturbation of such a high-Q cavity (Arnold et al., 2003
). Recently it has been shown that such high-Q resonators can be integrated on a chip (Armani et al., 2003
), which makes our sensing technique an interesting analytic component for a small and robust lab-on-a-chip device.
In this article we demonstrate that DNA hybridization on a silica microsphere surface can be quantified from the red shift of an optical resonance wavelength. Using a previously developed analytic theory (Arnold et al., 2003
; Teraoka et al., 2003; Vollmer et al., 2002
), we are able to determine the surface density of bound DNA target molecules. We furthermore show that each microsphere can be identified by its unique resonance wavelength. Using two microspheres, we demonstrate multiplexed DNA detection and the ability to discriminate a single nucleotide mismatch in an 11-mer oligonucleotide.
| EXPERIMENTAL PROTOCOL |
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4
h. The etching process is monitored with a 20x microscope. The etching is stopped with NaHCO3 solution as soon as the fiber diameter reaches 4 µm (the fiber core diameter is 6.6 µm). The spheres are held in place with separate x-y-z stages that allows positioning them in contact with the etched part of the optical fiber. Coupling occurs as soon as the evanescent field of the fiber and sphere overlap on mechanical contact. (If not mentioned otherwise, all chemicals were purchased from Sigma-Aldrich, Milwaukee, WI.)
Sphere fabrication and surface modification
The spheres (
200 µm radius) are fabricated by melting the tip of a stripped single-mode near-infrared optical fiber (125 µm diameter, FS-SC-6324, Thorlabs) in a butane/nitrous oxide microtorch flame (McMaster-Carr, Atlanta, GA). Surface tension forms the melted tip of the silica fiber into a spheroidal-shaped object (Fig. 1 B). The unmelted part of the fiber provides a useful stem for mounting the sphere on the x-y-z stage. After melting, the spheres are cleaned immediately by high-power oxygen plasma etching (plasma cleaner PDC-32G, Harrick, Ossining, NY) for 4 min. They are then immersed in a 4 µl hanging drop of a dextran-biotin solution (10 mg/ml, Sigma, St. Louis, MO) until dry, thus forming a dextran-biotin hydrogel on the sphere surface. After brief rinsing in water for
5 min, they are then incubated until dry in a hanging drop of 4 µl of a 7 µM solution of biotinylated oligonucleotides (Qiagen Operon, Alameda, CA), coupled to streptavidin (recombinant, E.coli, Sigma) at a molar ratio of 2:1. The spheres can be stored in the dry state for weeks. After brief dipping in water, the spheres are used immediately. Other oligonucleotides are also obtained from Qiagen Operon.
Fluorescent imaging of whispering gallery modes
In this case, the light from a 635 nm red laser diode (Sanyo DL3038-011, Thorlabs) is coupled into an SM-600 single-mode fiber (Canadian Instrumentation & Research). Evanescent coupling to the fiber is achieved as described before except that the SM-600 fiber is etched down to a final diameter of 2 µm. The spheres are immersed in a fluorophore solution (Cy5, Molecular Probes, Eugene, OR) diluted 1:100 from the stock in phosphate-buffered saline (PBS). The spheres are imaged on a cooled charge-coupled device camera (SensiCam, Cooke, Auburn Hills, MI) using an emission filter (D680/30M, Chroma Technology, Brattleboro, VT) and a standard 6x objective.
Analytic theory
An analytic theory had been developed that describes the shift of a whispering gallery mode (WGM) due to binding of polarizable molecules to the surface of the microsphere (Arnold et al., 2003
). For the binding of DNA to the sphere surface, we find the fractional shift of a resonance wavelength 
/
=
ex
s/[
0(ns2 - nb2)R], where
0 is the vacuum permittivity, R is the microsphere radius (200 µm), and ns (1.467) and nb (1.332) are the refractive indices of the sphere and the buffer solution, respectively.
ex is the excess polarizability (the polarizability in excess of an equal volume of water) and
s is the surface density of the bound DNA.
The fractional shift in wavelength for a single DNA molecule (Arnold et al., 2003
) binding on the surface of the sphere directly above the resonant light orbit (Fig. 1 B) is calculated as (
/
)s =
ex|Y|2/[
0(ns2 - nb2)R3], where Y is the spherical harmonic function describing the light orbit.
| RESULTS |
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Two-sphere multiplexing
First, we coupled one then both spheres to the fiber. The spheres were held in place by separate x-y-z stages that allowed independent coupling to the optical fiber. We observed no cross coupling between the WGMs of the two spheres that were located on the fiber several micrometers apart. Each sphere essentially removes energy independently from the optical fiber at its resonant wavelength (Fig. 2 A). Coupling strengths vary 3070% resulting in different amplitudes of the resonance dips. The sequential coupling of two spheres to the fiber allows one to unambiguously identify resonances corresponding to each individual sphere. A parabolic minimum fit allowed us to determine the resonance position at the minimum in the transmission signal. With this detection scheme, we could determine the position of a resonance with a precision of almost two orders of magnitude higher than given by the linewidth.
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For the hybridization of the complementary 27-mer oligonucleotide, we measured a wavelength shift of
0.038 nm. An analytic theory that relates the wavelength shift of a WGM in a microsphere to the surface density of bound molecules had been developed previously (Arnold et al., 2003
). For the 27-mer oligonucleotide with the excess polarizability (Nicolai et al., 1987
) of 4
0 x 4.8 x 10-22 cm3, we calculated the surface density of hybridized oligonucleotides as 3.6 x 1013 oligonucleotide targets/cm2.
Although the sphere surfaces were modified with a dextran hydrogel, the Q-factors of the WGMs were still on the order of 5 x 105 and largely limited by overtone vibrational absorption of water near 1.3 µm. Given this high Q-factor, a sphere diameter of 200 µm, and the noise level that allows determining a wavelength shift with a precision of 1/50 of the linewidth, we calculate the limit of our measurement technique as
6 pg/mm2 nucleic acid mass loading (the analytic theory is described in the Experimental section).
The spheres were modified with a dextran hydrogel. The biotinylated dextran forms a three-dimensional matrix on the sphere surface. Every dextran molecule is modified with
7 biotin groups, thus increasing the surface density by several layers of streptavidin binding sites. We immobilized the 27-mer oligonucleotide probes on the biotin-dextran hydrogel as a streptavidin-DNA complex. Each streptavidin molecule was bound to two biotinylated 27-mer oligonucleotides. We measured a wavelength shift of 0.255 nm for the binding of the streptavidin-DNA complex to the surface immobilized, biotinylated dextran-hydrogel. With the excess polarizability of 4
0 x 4.3 x 10-21 cm3 for the streptavidin-DNA complex, we estimated the density of immobilized oligonucleotide probes as 4.6 x 1013 oligonucleotide probes/cm2. By taking the ratio of the measured surface densities for the hybridized target strands and for the immobilized DNA probes, we find that 78% of the immobilized single-stranded DNA is accessible for hybridization.
Single nucleotide mismatch detection
Discrimination of a single nucleotide mismatch is an important analytic ability of any DNA biosensor. Detection of the mismatch is optimal at a specific temperature and salt concentration, which depends on the length of the oligonucleotide. We varied the salt concentration and determined with our setup the melting curves for match and mismatch hybridization of an 11-mer oligonucleotide on a single microsphere (Fig. 3). We found the hybridization signal from the matching sequence can be nearly 10 times as large as the one from the mismatching sequence if the experiments were performed in a 20 mM Tris buffer (pH 7.8) containing 30 mM NaCl at room temperature (
23°C). We used these optimized conditions in a measurement with two spheres. Sphere S1 was modified with the perfectly matching 11-mer oligonucleotide sequence; S2 carried the single nucleotide mismatch sequence.
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| DISCUSSION |
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6 pg/mm2 of polarizable DNA material on the microsphere surface leads to a detectable spectroscopic shift of the resonance. The sensitivity is higher as compared to that of commercial available SPR biosensing devices (>10 pg/mm2, corresponding to 10 response units in a Biacore instrument (Biacore, Uppsala, Sweden)). There is no need for a label, which makes our analytic system more accurate and widely applicable as compared to fluorescent techniques.
We demonstrate the multiplexed detection of specific DNA sequences with two microspheres coupled to a common waveguide. The use of smaller microspheres or toroidal-shaped particles will increase the distance between adjacent resonance wavelengths (Ilchenko et al., 2001
) and therefore coupling many microspheres to one waveguide in an array-type sensor can be realized. The silica microspheres can be replaced by silicon (Krioukov et al., 2002a
), InP microdisks (Djordjev et al., 2002
), or ultrahigh-Q toroid microcavities (Armani et al., 2003
), thus allowing miniaturization into an integrated semiconductor device. This could lead to a compact, portable biosensor with spot dimensions on the order of a few micrometers, which makes our platform an ideal analytic component for a lab-on-a-chip system.
As demonstrated for a single nucleotide mismatch detection, difference measurements with the two spheres allow one to remove common mode noise in experiments. The increase of resonance wavelength in one of the spheres can be compared to the other sphere interacting with the same sample analyte but lacking a specific biological factor of interest. For molecular interaction studies, the first sphere could be modified with the recognition element, whereas the second sphere is not modified. The difference signal eliminates most of the noise due to unspecific binding, temperature, and refractive index fluctuations that may occur, e.g., after injection. Thermal drifts are intrinsically eliminated because the change in resonance wavelength due to thermal expansion/contraction is independent of the microsphere size.
Several of our measurement platforms could be connected to a network by end-to-end coupling of the optical fiber. Such a distributed sensor could easily cover a large sensing area such as the circumference of a lake.
| ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS |
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F.V. was supported by a fellowship of the Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds. D.B. was supported by a fellowship of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. Research at Polytechnic University was supported by a National Science Foundation grant.
Submitted on April 28, 2003; accepted for publication June 11, 2003.
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