Work on the miniaturisation of biochemical assays includes establishment of a capillary electrophoresis system with a suitable on-column detector. A method for handling and injecting very small biological samples will also be developed. This will directly address the present biological problem of capturing and detecting very small quantities of DNA-protein complexes. Alternative assays will be investigated, as well as on-column reactions. At this stage it will be possible to specify a microfabricated device that will efficiently implement a broad range of useful functions.
Image processing is a tool that has established itself in modern molecular biology.
Ongoing activities already help in addressing biological problems related to the quantitative analysis and the comparison of images. The automatic detection and counting of particles for immunomicroscopy images using reconstruction of an orthogonal wavelet decomposition proved to be very successful. The analysis of video-microscopy image sequences has reached a stage where the analysis of movement is reliable. Future projects New technologies such as Si and GaAs based detectors will be tested. Special efforts will be put on the development of fast front-end electronics required to readout the detectors.