MAGNETIC DISK ARRAY DNA ANALYZER

该项目的具体目标是开发用于癌症研究和诊断的超灵敏和廉价分子分析的磁盘阵列（MDA）技术。第一阶段的主要目标是开发和完成一个实验室MDA设备，引入一种用磁颗粒标记生物分子的技术，并演示用MDA快速可靠地检测DNA。我们提出的方法是利用一种新的方法来制备和检测由DNA分子结合到磁盘表面的磁簇，这与传统的计算机磁盘非常相似。通过这种方法，可以通过监测表面的磁性来确定磁性标记DNA的空间位置，然后可以使用与最近引入的DNA芯片技术相同的方法来识别DNA序列。在第一阶段，具体目标是(1)系统地研究用于磁盘阵列的磁性标记材料(2)开发MDA设备并评估磁盘读取设备的性能。将特别努力实现超灵敏的DNA检测(3)演示在不需要扩增目标DNA的情况下使用MDA监测DNA杂交。建议的商业应用：MDA的潜在商业应用包括癌症突变筛查和医院遗传病诊断。由于分析速度快，在生物医学研究中非常有价值。它还可以用于法医应用的DNA指纹识别以及生物武器分析领域的快速微生物DNA分析。

The specific aim of this project is to develop Magnetic Disk Array (MDA) technology for ultra-sensitive and inexpensive molecular analysis for cancer research and diagnosis. The major goals of Phase I are to develop and complete a laboratory MDA device, to introduce a technique for tagging biomolecules by magnetic particles, and to demonstrate rapid and reliable DNA detection with the MDA. The approach we propose is to utilize a new method for preparing and detecting magnetic clusters bonded by a DNA molecule to the surface of a disk which is very similar to a conventional computer diskette. With this approach spacial location of a magnetically tagged DNA can be determined by monitoring magnetic properties of the surface and then can be used to identify the DNA sequence following the same approach as was recently introduced by DNA-on-chip technologies. During Phase I, the specific aims are (1) to systematically investigate magnetic tagging materials to be used for the Magnetic Disk Array (2) To develop the MDA device and evaluate the performance of magnetic disk reading equipment. Special effort will be made to achieve ultra-sensitive DNA detection (3) To demonstrate the use of MDA for monitoring DNA hybridization without the need of amplification of targets DNA. PROPOSED COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS: The potential commercial applications of MDA include mutation screening for cancer and genetic disease diagnosis for hospitals. Due to fast speed analysis, it is very valuable for biomedical research. It also can be used for DNA fingerprinting for forensic applications as well as rapid microbial DNA analysis in field for biological weapon analysis.