Micro-fluidic-based optical detection platform for characterizing fluorescing objects with integrated wavelength detection

This presentation will give a brief overview on on-the-flow analyte detection based on native fluorescence spectroscopy. This is a very promising approach that does not require specific binding or tagging of the analyte. However, the variety of cells is large compared to the number of basic molecular building blocks. Therefore, the fluorescence spectra of different species are often very similar, and sophisticated detection methods are required to reveal differences. The specificity of this approach can be further improved by implementing high spectral resolution and using multiple excitation wavelengths. In order to test class identification based on multi-color native fluorescence we have measured, with a conventional laboratory set-up, the laser-induced fluorescence spectra of various biological building blocks and recorded fluorescence spectra for representative analyte simulants.