Re: spectrometer -- two dimensional imager

I'm not sure it'd be worth casting DNA-resins, when it will naturally
degrade with use. Passing high-frequency light through the DNA will
eventually chew it up into monomers or less, so unless resin
casting/shaping is trivial..

However, I *do* like the idea of using an equivalent-absorbance sample
of non-DNA! That's pretty promising, you could pick something that
simply doesn't degrade much and it'd probably be cheap(er) to mass-produce.

On 26/11/11 18:37, Simon Quellen Field wrote:
> Assuming we had a sample of pure DNA, diluting it with known amounts
> of a solvent would be trivial. The solvent could be water, or it could be a
> preservative. The resulting calibration cuvette could be checked using a
> lab spectroscope.
>
> More interesting would be to add the DNA to acrylic resin to cast a long
> plastic sheet 1 centimeter thick, and then cut it up into slices that are
> the
> same shape as a cuvette. Again, testing it using a lab spectrometer would
> provide the desired confidence that the embedding resin does not alter
> the light at the two or three frequencies we are interested in for DNA
> quantization.
>
> The preserved DNA would be periodically checked to ensure that it has not
> degraded over time, and the calibration samples could be checked against
> one another for consistency to get statistics on accuracy. Given that most
> DNA
> quantization readings I have seen seem to expect no better than 10%
> accuracy,
> (i.e. readings of 1.8 or 2.0), the bar does not seem to be set to high for
> DIY.
>
> Another approach would be to find stable molecules that could be added to
> plastic
> that absorb light at the target wavelengths, and add them to the plastic in
> calibrated
> amounts to simulate the effects of two concentrations of DNA.

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