Over the preceding decades optical fibres have expanded
beyond their typical use in communications, to alternate applications in active
devices and sensors. While the majority of the work in this field has focused
on the development of structural health monitoring tools for civil engineering
and aviation, an ever increasing interest has developed in the use of optical
fibres for biosensing applications.
The unique guiding properties of optical fibres, combined
with the ability to place the sensing element has allowed for the use of these
fibres in widely varied applications. By adding a functional element to the
fibre, typically through the use of a fluorophore layer or resonant feature,
the fibre can be sensitized to a particular parameter such as temperature, pH
or chemical concentrations.
In this work we discuss the use of both microstructured
fibres, where small holes run along the length of the fibre to facilitate
interaction of the light with the analyte to be measured, as well as the
development of tip-based sensors using conventional large mode area optical
fibres.
By functionalizing these fibres sensors capable of
performing temporal and spatial measurements on very small volume samples are
developed, which show good potential for performing measurements in the local
media surrounding embryos which would typically be difficult to analyse using
conventional microscopy based techniques. These sensors are capable of performing
measurements of the pH of the solution, or the temperature experienced at a
localised spatial position.