Quartz Crystal Microbalance

Quartz crystal microbalance is an electrochemical analytical method which operates off of a very simple mass balance consisting of a thin quartz disk with noble metal electrodes (e.g., gold) on each side. The fundamental principle of this method uses the piezoelectric effect in quartz; thus, the change in the resonant frequency of the quartz is inversely related to change in mass resulting from specific binding of a biological target. Simplified robust, low-cost QCM devices based on patented circuits can be designed for protein or nucleic acid detection and could be configured for multiplex detection (e.g. pFalcip, CQ resistant pFalcip, MQ resistant, CQ, control). QCM could also be used to differentiate between many species of malarial parasite.

VU Developers:
David Cliffel (website)