Detection of gene mutation responsible for Huntington's disease by terahertz attenuated total reflection microfluidic spectroscopy

Abstract

Terahertz absorption spectroscopy based on attenuated total reflection (ATR) from a microfluidic sample cell was designed and implemented to detect gene mutations leading to Huntington's disease (HD). The self-developed compact ATR microfluidic system was employed to detect two groups of base-repeated DNA molecules combined with a terahertz timedomain spectrometer in a marker-free manner. The first group featured different repetition patterns of oligonucleotide fragments, and the second group

THz Detection of Biomolecules in Aqueous Environments—Status and Perspectives for Analysis Under Physiological Conditions and Clinical use

“…Consequently, molecules such as amino acids (and urea as a metabolite), nucleosides, nucleotides and nucleic acids are investigated by the THz community. The characteristics of these molecules, such as temperature-dependent absorption spectra [28,48], the dielectric response of molecular solutions such as completely solvated mono-and oligonucleotides [7,51,68,119,146,155,[160][161][162], modifications of the molecular structure and spectral signatures as a function of both the polarization state of incident radiation [52] and the hydration level [94], have been reported.…”