Surface plasmon resonance acoustic techniques

The reaction between the analjrte and the bioreceptor produces a physical or chemical output signal normally relayed to a transducer, which then generally converts it into an electrical signal, providing quantitative information of analytical interest. The transducers can be classified based on the technique utilized for measurement, being optical (absorption, luminescence, surface plasmon resonance), electrochemical, calorimetric, or mass sensitive measurements (microbalance, surface acoustic wave), etc. If the molecular recognition system and the physicochemical transducer are in direct spatial contact, the system can be defined as a biosensor [76]. A number of books have been published on this subject and they provide details concerning definitions, properties, and construction of these devices [77-82]. 

Af/f is small whenever rq,2 is close to one. Conversely, since the QCM only works well when the normalized frequency shift Af/ff is small, it makes sense to assume 1. Equation 39 shows that quartz crystals are acoustic re-flectometers. The results of QCM measurements can therefore be easily compared to data obtained with other forms of ultrasonic reflectometry [57,58]. It is well known from optical techniques such as elUpsometry [59] or surface plasmon resonance (SPR) spectroscopy [60] that a film thickness can be inferred from a measurement of the reflectivity. The same applies to acoustics. 

As a consequence, researchers from different disciplines of the life sciences ask for efficient and sensitive techniques to characterize protein binding to and release from natural and artificial membranes. Native biological membranes are often substituted by artificial lipid bilayers bearing only a limifed number of components and rendering the experiment more simple, which permits the extraction of real quantitative information from binding experiments. Adsorption and desorption are characterized by rate constants that reflect the interaction potential between the protein and the membrane interface. Rate constants of adsorption and desorption can be quantified by means of sensitive optical techniques such as surface plasmon resonance spectroscopy (SPR), ellipsometry (ELL), reflection interference spectroscopy (RIfS), and total internal reflection fluorescence microscopy (TIRE), as well as acoustic/mechanical devices such as the quartz crystal microbalance (QCM)... 

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