earticle

영어

We have successfully developed optically coded functional microbeads by coencapsulating both bioluminescent reporter bacterial cells and fluorescent microspheres within a common alginate microbead [1]. This smart functional microbead has a specific stress‐specific bacterial strain and, as an its identification optical code, one of five optical codes generated from fluorescence microspheres such as yellow, green, red, yellow + green, or no fluoresce. These smart microbeads could be randomly scattered on any multi‐well chip plate with the result that, since the cell types are identified on the basis of fluorescent color, the microbead arrays were fabricated without pre‐designation of an individual well. As an example of this method, five different stress specific bioluminescent bacterial strains, each with a different optical code, were successfully implemented to make five different types of optically coded functional microbeads, with a speed of about 30 microbeads/min. This final randomly scattered functional microbeads array biochip, with a fast fabrication of each chip at every 2 min, successfully demonstrated its ability in toxicity screening and monitoring for samples with a few examples for five different stress chemicals.
This simple and fast, but not tedious and complicated procedure should be widely and practically used in making the cell array chips for the monitoring of environmental toxicity, new‐borne chemicals, pharmaceutical drugs and the cosmic rays in space station or spaceships in future.