Abstract

The extreme sensitivity of fluorescence spectrophotometry results from the fact that a molecule can undergo many excitation-emission cycles before destruction by photochemical degradation. For example, Rhodamine 6G (R6G) can emit in excess of 10⁵ photons before photolysis takes place (1). The fraction of emitted photons collected and converted to countable pulses can be as high as 10^-3, although 10^-4 is more readily attainable. Therefore, sufficient signal exists for single molecules to be detectable. Detection limits for molecules in solution have been limited by background signal from solvent Raman scattering and fluorescence. This background signal adds noise to the measurement and has effectively restricted the detectable concentration to about 10^-13 molar. Over the past decade, advances in detection of fewer molecules have all been made by reducing the measurement volume and/or increasing the measuring time. Given the above concentration detection limit a reduction of the measurement volume to 1 pL leads to a minimum observable quantity of ≈ 1 molecule. The ability to detect a single molecule in condensed phase could have many important applications in addition to being an interesting problem. The obvious application of this approach is to situations where small quantities of material are available for analysis. The capability to reliably detect a single fluorophore might also allow the screening and/or sorting of a collection of molecules. Such abilities would have application to many biological problems such as DNA sequencing and detection of DNA adducts.

© 1990 Optical Society of America