Rapid and low-cost diagnosis of COVID-19 is essential to identify the infected subjects, particularly the asymptomatic cases, primarily to arrest the spread of the disease through local transmission. Antibody-based chromatographic serological tests, as an alternative to RT-PCR, offer only limited help due to high false positives. We propose to exploit our field-deployable/ portable plasmonic fiber-optic absorbance biosensor (P-FAB) platform for one-step, wash-free detection of SARS-CoV-2 virus particles directly in saliva sample with minimal sample pre-processing.

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Cellular heterogeneity of any tissue or organ makes it challenging to identify and study the impact and the treatment of any disease. In this context, analysis of cells at an individual level becomes highly relevant for throwing light on the heterogeneous nature of cells. Single cell analysis can be used to gain insights into an overall view of any disease, thereby holding great applications in health diagnosis, disease identification, drug screening, and targeted delivery. Various conventional methods, such as flow cytometry, are used to isolate and study single cells. Still, these methods are narrower in scope due to certain limitations, including the associated processing/run times, the economy of reagents, and sample preparation. Microfluidics, an emerging technology, overcomes such limitations and is now being widely applied to develop tools for the isolation, analysis, and parallel manipulation of single cells. This review systematically compiles various microfluidic tools and techniques involved in single cell investigation. The review begins by highlighting the applications of microfluidics in single cell sorting and manipulation, followed by emphasizing microfluidic platforms for single cell analysis, with a specific focus on optical sensing-based detection in a high-throughput fashion, and ends with applications in cancer cell studies.

A dielectric‐barrier discharge (DBD) in an argon–water mixture is applied to plasma pretreatment (PP) of amorphous silica for subsequent vapor‐phase silanization (VS) in the same reactor. Comparison of amino‐silanization of silica fiber‐optic biosensor probes using a PP/VS sequence with strategies involving wet‐chemical pretreatment or silanization shows a considerable improvement in reproducibility by the completely dry process. Practical applicability is demonstrated by an immunoassay with human immunoglobulin G as analyte. Thanks to the advantages of shorter processing time, avoidance of washing steps, and improved reproducibility, PP/VS is highly promising for industrial use.