Flourescence Correlation Spectroscopy (FCS), the Detection Method for Sub-Microliter Miniaturized Biological Assays

Abstract

The measurement of biochemical interaction in very small volumes has recently become a key issue in biotechnological applications in such fields as the life sciences, agriculture, ecology, to name but a few. The cost of biochemical substances in macroscopic amounts, not to mention their scarcity, is one of the driving forces behind the need to miniaturize of sample preparation, handling and analysis. Moreover, recently developed, massively parallel experimental approaches, such as combinatorial chemistry or evolutionary strategies, employed in the search for active compounds contribute to the need for miniaturization. The sheer number of similar samples, often surpassing 100,000 samples per batch, prohibits a macroscopic approach. Another field which is presently subject of a combinatorial explosion of numbers is genomic science. Here hybridization of oligomers for sequencing or comparison purposes is carried out in massively parallel approaches.