Biosensing with photonic crystal surfaces

Photonic crystals (PC) designed to produce narrow bandwidth resonant modes that extend into a surrounding fluid media have resulted in a variety of approaches for measuring the interaction of light with biological material. Label-free optical biosensing, PC-enhanced fluorescence (PCEF), PC-enhanced surface-enhance Raman spectroscopy (PC-SERS), and distributed feedback laser biosensor technology have resulted from the ability to inexpensively produce large-area PC surfaces by methods that include nanoreplica molding in plastic and nanoimprint lithography on glass. This talk will summarize recent research in the Nano Sensors Group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in which PC surfaces are used to address a variety of biosensing needs in pharmaceutical high throughput screening, disease diagnostic testing, gene expression analysis, chemical analysis, and point-of-care detection systems. Because PC surfaces can be produced upon inexpensive and flexible plastic substrates, they are inexpensively manufactured by roll-to-roll fabrication methods and incorporated into disposable microplates, cartridges, microscope slides, plastic tubing, and other labware.