A microchip for quantitative detection of molecules utilizing luminescent and radioisotope reporter groups

Through the marriage of microelectronics and molecular biology, a miniaturized device is presented for ultrasensitive detection of labeled molecules. The novelty of the approach is the direct integration of a charge-coupled device (CCD) and a probe-based assay. Specifically, a CCD detector serves as an active solid support that quantitatively detects and images the distribution of labeled target molecules near the spatially addressable pixels. The device exploits the inherent characteristics of microelectronics that accommodate highly parallel assays, ultrasensitive detection, high throughput, integrated data acquisition and computation. Hence, the technology presented offers substantial practical utility to both research and clinical diagnostic applications that require quantitative analysis of bound molecules. Specifically for probe-based assays such as reverse dot blots, hybridization of radiolabeled or fluorescently labeled, target DNA can be quantitatively assessed within seconds due to the high sensitivity and direct coupling employed.