Date of Award

2011

Document Type

Honors Thesis

Department

Engineering & Computer Science

First Advisor

Hyun J. Kwon

Abstract

Detection of H1N1 or other seasonal and highly contagious viruses are of vital importance, since early diagnosis from a patient's fluid, such as saliva, would accelerate treatment and containment of the flu. Current lab tests often require cumbersome labeling steps and several hours to detect the presence of viral DNAs. The QCM-D (quartz crystal microbalances with dissipation) technology was used to detect presence as well as distinguish H1N1 and H1N5 DNAs in real-time (a few minutes) with the use of relatively small sample volume (200-500 ul). Single stranded complementary H1N1 DNA was immobilized via Neutravidin-biotin linkage on a gold substrate where biotin was anchored through self assembled monolayers (SAM). Samples containing ss-H1N1 or H5N1 DNA were introduced to the sensor chamber at various sensing conditions. Effect of temperature, ionic strength in buffer, and flow rate were studied and discussed in this paper. The setup allowed recognition and monitoring of kinetics of up to 100 nano-molar (nM) concentrations H1N1/H5N1 DNA in real-time without cumbersome labeling steps. This result demonstrates possibility of real-time diagnosis of H1N1 or other contagious viruses in a doctor's office.

Subject Area

H1N1 influenza, Swine influenza, Quartz crystal microbalances

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

DOI

https://dx.doi.org/10.32597/honors/14/

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