Biosensing Project Update

Over the Summer we hosted Zelie Brodard from the l'Institut d'Optique in France for a 12-week internship working with myself and Dr. Isabel Llorente-Garcia on our Whispering Gallery Mode (WGM) biosensing project.

Zelie successfully set-up a WGM system in liquid; this is the first time my work has been conducted in liquid! She functionalised the surface of the silica microspheres by coating with vectorbond (its like glue!) and then measuring the WGM shift as she injects Bovine serum albumin (BSA) which attaches onto the vectorbond. Zelie then injected streptavidin which binds onto the BSA. We wish Zelie all the best in her studies and recommend her as a fantastic researcher - she handed the experiment with grace, patience and skill!

Below is a graph that Zelie made that shows the WGM shift as she injects BSA 5 times. Note that this is preliminary data (we have lots of data files to analyse in more detail) but shows great promise for our final aim; detection of amyloid beta for early diagnosis of Alzeimer’’s disease.