Architecture of a Portable System Based on a Biochip for DNA Recognition

This paper presents an architecture for a portable system based on a magnetoresistive biochip microarray for DNA recognition or microorganism/cell identification. In this biochip, biological targets are labeled with magnetic nanoparticles which are used to guide target over surface immobilized probes. Furthermore, the magnetic stray field created by those labels is detected by on-chip magnetic resistive sensors providing target and probe molecular recognition. The architecture is proposed for developing a biochip platform that incorporates electronics for addressing, reading out, sensing and controlling temperature and, in addition, a handheld analyzer capable of multiparameter identification. The biochip platform can be plugged in a peripheric standard bus of the analyzer device or communicate through a wireless channel. The system is being developed in the scope of a multidisciplinary research project, some preliminar results provided in the paper show that the architecture is implementable and adequate for achieving the intended purposes.