Meeting with Prof. Mohammad Qasaimeh
Date - 20-08-2020
Participants: @Yaman Garg @Roba Olana
Lysis:
- He says the best lysis that we can try to do is with heating + chemicals only since other things are harder to operate
- He can provide support for electrode fabrication as well, and said that they are also an ok but high-tech option
- He has a phd student working on single cell electrical lysis, who could be helpful in-case we do go down that route
Sensing:
- He finds fluorescence to be most versatile = quantitative + qualitative
- He thinks that it is better to use commercial LFA strips for now if we go down that route, later we can switch to ordering our own custom LFA strips
- He says electrodes for E-CRISPR will be harder to employ since they tend to be fragile and can have non-specific binders affecting the sensitivity
Detection Medium:
- He said microfluidic chips themselves might not be very sensible since air bubbles and such problems are frequent and very difficult to work with in field
- He said to look if there is a commercial version of slip chip or snap chip that can help us
- He said to think about PCR tubes in a modifying way, or a PCR tube + paper chip
- He said that a paper-based flow device is much more feasible for the field
- He also said that if we only work with non-modified PCR tubes, our contribution to the larger field of POC molecular diagnostics will only be the optical detector (this is in the context of publishing something in the future).
Random:
- He said building a portable low-cost thermocycler is interesting for capstone lol