Study on design and application of fully automatic miniature surface plasmon resonance concentration analyzer

Abstract A fully automatic miniature surface plasmon resonance (SPR) concentration analyzer having high performance and low cost and developed using a Spreeta™ sensor was designed for field applications and concentration analysis. As in the case of Biacore™ instruments, the automatic sampling system of this device can introduce air segments between the sample/regeneration solution and buffer solution in the pipeline, which effectively prevents mixing of the solutions. A temperature sensor (AD 590) and temperature compensation method are used, which make the device insensitive to temperature fluctuations. A real-time data-smoothing algorithm for the SPR detection data is adopted; this can reduce the noise level to 5 × 10−7 RIU (refractive index units). The noise level of the sensorgram is 3.5% of the original level. Two types of self-prepared sensing chips—SMX-BSA (bovine serum albumin coated with sulfamethoxazole) and SMX-CM5 (carboxymethyl dextran coated with sulfamethoxazole)—are used to analyze the concentrations of sulfamethoxazole (SMX) standard solutions. Each chip's SMX calibration curve is established within the measurement range of 0–2000 ng/ml, and both limits of detection (LOD) are 2 ng/ml. One cycle of assay time is less than 15 min.