Current Status on Biochip and Detection Technology

The recent biotechnology technique has been miniaturized and it features a fusion of electricity, electronics and mechanics in the existing biology. As an example, biochip is a collection of miniaturized test sites (microarrays) arranged on a solid substrate that permits many tests to be performed at the same time in order to achieve higher throughput and speed. Like a computer chip that can perform millions of mathematical operations in a second, the biochip can perform thousands of biological reactions, such as decoding genes, in a few seconds. The biochip is being used in toxicological, protein, and biochemical research and it can also be used to rapidly detect chemical agents used in biological warfare so that defensive measures can be taken. These biochip technologies incorporate elements of microfluidics, micromachining, synthetic chemistry, separation technologies, and detection technologies of biological molecules. Basically, biochips can be divided into two types: microarray and lab-on-a-chip system. Microarrays use planted probes to catch and identify target biological molecules while lab-on-a-chips actively process loaded samples. The biochips are becoming more diverse and customers are appearing all over the world. The products from the biochip market are being used to help accelerating the research processes and capabilities of bio-pharmaceutical drug discovery and basic academic bioresearch. To fully take advantages of the attributes of biochip technologies such as miniaturization, parallelism, automation and integration, there are some problems to overcome. The major problem is to reduce the cost. Currently the prices of biochip products are too expensive to replace traditional products and processes. As a method to solve the problem, a radioisotope can be used as a detecting sensor by appling on the biochip, as it were, radio-biochip that will further bring the cost down. The originality using the radioisotope on the biochip technology will be able to expect a creation of economic added value