SBIR Phase II: Fiber Optic Affinity Ligand Sensor for Quantification of Petroleum and Bioremediation

该小型企业创新研究(SBIR)项目将开发具有成本效益的光纤传感器，用于在污染场地的生物修复过程中快速检测石油和微生物活动。危险化学品被发现污染燃料勘探、生产、提炼和储存地点的地面。生物修复技术现在被用来去除这些危险化学物质。然而，由于目前具有必要敏感性和特异性的技术所固有的费用和时间延迟，对这些地点的监测一直受到阻碍。气相色谱-质谱联用(GC/MS)、毛细管区带电泳法(CZE)和高效液相色谱(HPLC)用于监测环境暴露和微生物活性，生物量测定用于监测修复过程。GC/MS、CZE和HPLC都需要昂贵的仪器、广泛的操作员专业知识和非现场实验室。生物量分析是耗时的，而且不能保证对感兴趣的微生物的特异性。第二阶段将寻求一种基于革命性的长周期光栅(LPG)的新型光纤传感器，通过检测由于目标分子结合到亲和涂层而导致的折射率变化来满足这一需求，从而实现快速定量检测。这些基于光纤的化学和生物传感器与目前的商业环境监测仪器相比具有许多优点，包括成本较低、实时测量能力、现场应用的便携性以及高灵敏度和选择性。这些优势将使光纤传感器仪器渗透到数十亿美元的环境测试、制药研究和工业过程监控领域。

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project will develop cost-effective optical fiber sensors for rapid detection of petroleum and microbial activity during bioremediation of contaminated sites. Hazardous chemicals are found to contaminate the ground at fuel exploration, production, refinement, and storage sites. Bioremediation techniques are now used to remove these hazardous chemicals. However, monitoring these sites has been hindered by the expense and time delays inherent with current techniques capable of the necessary sensitivity and specificity. Gas chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry (GC/MS), capillary zone electrophoresis (CZE), and high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) are used to monitor environmental exposure and microbial activity, while biomass assays are used to monitor remediation processes. GC/MS, CZE, and HPLC all require expensive instrumentation, extensive operator expertise, and an off-site laboratory. Biomass assays are time consuming, and specificity for the microbe of interest is not guaranteed. Phase II will pursue a novel optical fiber sensor based on the revolutionary long-period grating (LPG), that can meet this need by detecting changes in refractive index resulting from target molecules binding to an affinity coating, thus enabling rapid quantitative detection. These optical fiber-based chemical and biological sensors have numerous advantages over current commercial environmental monitoring instrumentation, including lower cost, real-time measurement capability, portability for field applications, and high sensitivity and selectivity. These advantages will allow optical fiber sensor instrumentation to penetrate the multibillion-dollar environmental testing, pharmaceutical research, and industrial process monitoring fields.