Hardware Attachment and Dedicated App Turn Smartphone into a Fluorescence Microscope

A hardware attachment with an associated application (app) turns a smartphone into a sensitive microscope capable of determining the length of individual DNA molecules.

Investigators at the University of California, Los Angeles (USA) installed a compact, lightweight, and cost-effective fluorescence microscope onto the mobile phone's camera. In addition to the hardware attachment that created a high contrast dark-field imaging setup comprising an external lens, thin-film interference filters, a miniature dovetail stage, and a laser-diode for oblique-angle excitation; they also created a computational framework and a mobile phone application (app) connected to a server at the University of California, Los Angeles.


Fluorescently label DNA molecules were stretched onto disposable chips and analyzed with the smartphone microscope. The app transmitted the raw data to the server, where a program determined the lengths of individual DNA molecules. The results of DNA detection and length measurement could be viewed on the mobile phone and on remote computers linked to the server.

“The ability to translate these and other existing microscopy and sensing techniques to field-portable, cost-effective and high-throughput instruments can make possible myriad new applications for point-of-care medicine and global health,” said senior author Dr. Aydogan Ozcan, professor of electrical engineering and bioengineering at the University of California, Los Angeles. “These devices could have far-reaching positive impact on research and educational efforts in developing countries or resource-limited institutions, helping democratize advanced scientific instruments and measurement tools.”

Details regarding the smartphone microscope were published in the December 10, 2014, online edition of the journal ACS Nano.

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University of California, Los Angeles