Building and characterizing a fluorescence setup to measure very low concentrations of analytes/biomarkers

This training report is the result of my internship in the B-Phot Brussels Photonics team of the VUB<br> that took place between February 3 and April 3, 2020. The project of this internship nds its context<br> in the European SensApp project which regroups several European research institutes and universities,<br> including the VUB. The goal of this project is to develop a method to diagnose the Alzheimer's disease<br> in a faster and non-invasive manner, simply through a blood test, which is currently not possible because<br> the concentration of biomarkers of the Alzheimer's disease in the blood is too low. During this internship,<br> I was lead to build, align and calibrate a uorescence detection setup. Using this setup, I made mea-<br> surements of the uorescence intensity of low concentrations of dye solutions. From those measurements,<br> I performed calculations of the signal to noise ratio in order to determine the limit of detection of the<br> setup. Finally, I studied the kinetics of photobleaching in order to get to a better understanding of its<br> impact on the measurements.