J. Paul Robinson, the Professor of Cytomics in Purdue’s College of Veterinary Medicine and professor in Purdue’s Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, who was involved in the research.
Researchers from Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia and Purdue University are researching so-called “t-Dots,” luminescent nanocrystals, as marker tags for use in medical screening and other applications. Their latest work, published in Nature Communications, has focused on offering a new variable in optical detection of luminescent nanoparticles: time.
Currently, the color and brightness of light emitted from excited nanoparticles are the essential optical characteristics used in a variety of technologies that utilize luminescent nanoparticles. The new development allows researchers to control how much a nanocrystal shines following excitation, which can offer a new level of precision and significantly increase the speed and multiplexing of various diagnostic tests. The team tested the technology in detecting pathogen DNA strands and have reported that “tunable luminescence lifetimes have considerable potential in high-throughput analytical sciences,” according to the study abstract.
Study in Nature Communications: On-the-fly decoding luminescence lifetimes in the microsecond region for lanthanide-encoded suspension arrays…