Cell Phone Fluorimeter

To sense the fluorescent signal from our Flappase SNP detection system, we will need to develop a cell phone fluorimeter. In our assay, when an SNP is detected, the fluorescently-tagged 5’ end of a Flap oligo will be released from proximity to a fluorescence quencher and a fluorescent signal will be produced. Thus, our end-users will need a way to detect this signal. We focused on developing an easy-to-use and portable device. In order to make a device that is convenient for the user, we decided to build a device that uses a cell phone. Although we did not have time to make much progress on this part of our project, we were able to gather information on cell phone-based fluorimeters that have been developed by others. One model was of a smartphone-based portable fluorimeter from the research paper, Lab-in-a-phone: Smartphone-based Portable Fluorometer for pH Field Measurements of Environmental Water. According to this paper, the cell phone fluorimeter was used to measure pH of environmental water samples (1). The model of this specific device is beneficial because it has open source code and is a platform compatible with Android devices (1). Figure CF-01 illustrates the schematic for the parts needed for the cell phone fluorimeter to work. We intend to use the basic design of this system, adapting the sample holder to be compatible with the remainder of our system.

Figure 1: Schematic of a cell phone-based fluorimeter model (Reference 1). This device requires only a few parts that are required for the device to function, making this construction compatible for many smartphones.

References

1. Hossain, A., Canning, J., Ast, S., Rutledge, P. J., Yen, T. L., & Jamalipour, A. (2015). Lab-in-a-Phone: Smartphone-Based Portable Fluorometer for pH Measurements of Environmental Water. IEEE Sensors Journal, 15(9), 5095-5102. doi:10.1109/jsen.2014.2361651