General purpose, field-portable cell-based biosensor platform

There are several groups of researchers developing cell-based biosensors fo r chemical and biological warfare agents based on electrophysiologic monito ring of cells. ln order to transition such sensors from the laboratory to t he field, a general-purpose hardware and software Platform is required. Thi s paper describes the design, implementation, and field-testing of such a s ystem, consisting of cell-transport and data acquisition instruments. The c ell-transport module is a self-contained, battery-powered instrument that a llows various types of cell-based modules to be maintained at a preset temp erature and ambient CO, level while in transit or in the field. The data ac quisition module provides 32 channels of action potential amplification, fi ltering, and real-time data streaming to a laptop computer, At present, det ailed analysis of the data acquired is carried out off-line, but sufficient computing power is available in the data acquisition module to enable the most useful algorithms to eventually be run real-time in the field. Both mo dules have sufficient internal power to permit realistic field-testing, suc h as the example presented in this paper. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. Al l rights reserved.