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