LED-based Interferometric Reflectance Imaging Sensor for quantitative dynamic monitoring of biomolecular interactions

Label-free optical biosensors have been established as proven tools for monitoring specific biomolecular interactions. However, compact and robust embodiments of such instruments have yet to be introduced in order to provide sensitive, quantitative, and high-throughput biosensing for low-cost research and clinical applications. Here we present the Interferometric Reflectance Imaging Sensor (IRIS) using an inexpensive and durable multi-color LED illumination source to monitor protein–protein and DNA–DNA interactions. We demonstrate the capability of this system to dynamically monitor antigen–antibody interactions with a noise floor of 5.2 pg/mm2 and DNA single mismatch detection under denaturing conditions in an array format. Our experiments show that this platform has comparable sensitivity to high-end label-free biosensors at a much lower cost with the capability to be translated to field-deployable applications.