Adaptive optical biocompact disk for molecular recognition

We report the use of adaptive interferometry to detect a monolayer of protein immobilized in a periodic pattern on a spinning glass disk. A photorefractive quantum-well device acting as an adaptive beam mixer in a two-wave mixing geometry stabilizes the interferometric quadrature in the far field. Phase modulation generated by the spinning biolayer pattern in the probe beam is detected as a homodyne signal free of amplitude modulation. Binding between antibodies and immobilized antigens in a two-analyte immunoassay was tested with high specificity and without observable cross reactivity. (c) 2005 American Institute of Physics.