Highly Precise and Fast Polymerase Chain Reaction Thermal Cycling Module with a Novel Integrated Temperature Control Strategy

摘要

This paper aims at developing a high precise and fast thermal cycling module (TCM), which consists of a thermoelectric cooler (TEC), a TEC temperature sensor and a power manager. A novel integrated temperature control strategy based on relay auto-tuning and bang-bang-fuzzy-proportional-integral-derivative (BB-FPID) algorithms was established and applied to control TCM. The developed TCM was integrated into a cassette-based nucleic acid test system and features the advantages of precision of +/- 0.1 degrees C, overshoot of 0.5 degrees C, maximum heating rate of 4 degrees C/s and maximum cooling rate of 3 degrees C/s, respectively, which demonstrated equivalent or better performance compared with commercial thermal cyclers. Escherichia coli (E. coli) was selected to evaluate the performance of polymerase chain reaction (PCR). The gel electrophoresis analysis of PCR products indicated the successful amplification of E. coli DNA. This TCM has great potential to integrate into thermal cyclers, enabling high precise and fast PCR.