Microarray technology is able to measure the presence and amount of thousands of biological molecules simultaneously with a single chip. It is widely used in research and applications to clinical medicine are under development. Microarrays require scanners to read out their information and the scanner is most often the bottleneck in laboratory throughput. Today, most scanners use laser-scanning technology, which reads out only a single image pixel at a time and is quite slow. Our overall objective is to develop technology for a scanner with much higher throughput than the current state of the art. The scanner will use a charge-coupled device (CCD) that allows all the pixels in the image to be read out in parallel. CCD technology has not been widely adopted for microarray scanners.
Our specific aim i s to show the feasibility of our innovative technology to increase CCD scanner performance: shorter scan time, larger dynamic range, lower cross talk between the excitation and fluorescence signals, and higher spatial resolution. In Phase I, we propose to build a breadboard implementing our innovations. We will show feasibility by making quantitative measurements of physical test arrays. We will also make test scans of microarrays fabricated with our internal facility and also micorarrays of biological samples such as tumor RNA provided by our collaborators.
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