Optical design of a quantitative microvolume nucleic acid spectrophotometer with non-optical fiber and all radiation-hardened lens elements

Abstract

The purity of the nucleic acid samples obtained by extraction/precipitation or adsorption chromatography must be verified with microvolume spectrophotometry to ensure a high success rate of the subsequent nucleic acid sequencing while exploring the trace rare nucleic acids in space exploration with in-situ life detection. This paper reports an optical design for a radiation-hardened quantitative microvolume spectrophotometer with all radiation-hardened lens elements for space exploration instruments by using a non-optical fiber optical path with radiation-hardened optical glass elements. The results showed that the mean absolute error rate of the measured standard ribonucleic acid samples at concentrations between 50 ng/µL and 2300 ng/µL was within 2% when compared with a LINKO LKU–6000 ultraviolet–visible spectrophotometer.