Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jan 23, 2026

Genetic Barcoding with Fluorescent Proteins for Multiplexed Applications
Published on: April 14, 2015
Ion-chelation based digital barcodes for multiplexing of a suspension array
Guangxia Feng1, Tian Guan, Qinghua He
1Institute of Optical Imaging and Sensing, Shenzhen Key Laboratory for Minimal Invasive Medical Technologies, Graduate School at Shenzhen, Tsinghua University, Shenzhen 518055, People's Republic of China. heyh@sz.tsinghua.edu.cn.
Abstract:
Ion-chelated microbeads (ICMs) for suspension arrays can be prepared by chelating metal ions (MIs), which are used as encoding materials. Stimulating the ICMs, laser induced breakdown spectra (LIBs) can be obtained and the atomic spectra of the chelated ions are chosen as the decoding signals. Our ICMs show digital characteristics with high stability due to the properties of LIBs. And, since there are many available coding materials and different kinds of coding materials can be easily combined, the coding capacity can be considerably enlarged. Further, the background interference in fluoroimmunoassay detection could be avoided, because the ICMs contain no fluorescence emission. In our studies, we achieved a total of 15 types of barcodes by taking full advantage of 4 kinds of ions, then a fluoroimmunoassay was performed to demonstrate the specificity and detection performance of our ICMs in multiplexing and the detection limit could reach 1.49 × 10-10 M, showing promising potential in applications.
Related Concept Videos
Ions as Acids and Bases
Salts are ionic compounds composed of cations and anions, either of which may be capable of undergoing an acid or base ionization reaction with water. Aqueous salt solutions, therefore, may be acidic, basic, or neutral, depending on the relative acid-base strengths of the salt’s constituent ions. For example, dissolving the ammonium chloride in water results in its dissociation, as described by the equation:
Common Ion Effect
Complexation Equilibria: The Chelate Effect
Formation of Complex Ions
Precipitation of Ions
The equation that describes the equilibrium between solid calcium carbonate and its solvated ions is:
Ion Channels
Ion channels are specialized integral membrane proteins on the plasma membrane that allow...

