Neglected tropical diseases, including filoviruses, constitute a class of diseases affecting some of the most impoverished and vulnerable populations worldwide. Despite their significant impact, there is a pressing need for diagnostics that can effectively and rapidly detect pathogens in field settings. Herein, we present a portable diagnostic platform leveraging plasmonic fluors and lateral flow assays for the detection of filoviruses. Plasmonic fluors are a class of engineered, ultrabright fluorescent probes whose versatility and amenability towards use in a variety of diagnostics is a major clinical strength. Our resulting assay has a rapid turnaround time and sensitivities amenable for field deployment.
Whispering Gallery Mode (WGM) microresonators are a class of optical sensors with the ability to trap and confine light under optical resonance conditions. Typically, this resonance is excited inside a WGM resonator using expensive and bulky tunable diode lasers, which can be a limiting factor in low-resource settings and in developing economies. In the manuscript, we describe a method of “reverse tuning” to modify the resonance conditions, paving the way for lower cost WGM excitation and ultimately lower cost sensing. We demonstrate three different methods of reverse tuning the WGM using temperature, pressure, and refractive index in a microbubble resonator (MBR), a subclass of WGM sensors that is particularly well-suited for reverse tuning using the three aforementioned methods. By reducing the cost of the MBR platform through reverse tuning, we can make these ultra-sensitive devices more practical and accessible in low-resource settings.
WGM sensors are a class of optical sensors in which light is tightly confined due to optical resonance within a circular geometry. Expensive tunable diode lasers are typically used to excite resonance in a WGM device, which can be a cost limiting factor in developing economies. Herein, we developed a “reverse tuning” method that eliminates the need for such expensive laser sources. We show the microbubble resonator (MBR), a sub class of WGM devices, is ideally suited for the reverse tuning method by tuning with temperature, pressure and refractive index changes. Reducing the cost of the MBR platform, by utilizing less expensive laser sources with fixed wavelength, increases the practicality of these devices for use in low resource settings. We expect our methods to reduce the total cost of the sensing platform from thousands to a few hundred dollars.
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