A plasmonic gold nanofilm-based microfluidic chip for rapid and inexpensive droplet-based photonic PCR

Abstract

Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is a powerful tool for nucleic acid amplification and quantification. However, long thermocycling time is a major limitation of the commercial PCR devices in the point-of-care (POC). Herein, we have developed a rapid droplet-based photonic PCR (dpPCR) system, including a gold (Au) nanofilm-based microfluidic chip and a plasmonic photothermal cycler. The chip is fabricated by adding mineral oil to uncured polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) to suppress droplet evaporation in PDMS microfluidic chips during PCR thermocycling. A PDMS to gold bonding technique using a double-sided adhesive tape is applied to enhance the bonding strength between the oil-added PDMS and the gold nanofilm. Moreover, the gold nanofilm excited by two light-emitting diodes (LEDs) from the top and bottom sides of the chip provides fast heating of the PCR sample to 230 °C within 100 s. Such a design enables 30 thermal cycles from 60 to 95 °C within 13 min with the average heating and cooling rates of 7.37 ± 0.27 °C/s and 1.91 ± 0.03 °C/s, respectively. The experimental results demonstrate successful PCR amplification of the alcohol oxidase (AOX) gene using the rapid plasmonic photothermal cycler and exhibit the great performance of the microfluidic chip for droplet-based PCR.

Micro- and nanosystems for the detection of hemorrhagic fever viruses

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Assessing Different PCR Master Mixes for Ultrarapid DNA Amplification: Important Analytical Parameters

“…These techniques have applications in fields such as clinical diagnostics, pathogen detection, and genotyping, where rapid turnaround times are crucial. Ultrarapid PCR techniques aim to provide results in a fraction of the time compared to traditional PCR methods [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 ].…”

Introducing Novel Droplet Generators: Enhanced Mixing Efficiency and Reduced Droplet Size

“…Droplet-based microfluidic systems have gained significant attention within the field of microfluidics due to their ability to enable a wide range of functions. These systems have proven to be highly versatile, allowing for tasks such as biochemistry, single cell analysis, chemical synthesis, polymerase chain reaction (PCR), loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP), and the production of specialized microparticles and nanoparticles (Amirifar et al, 2022;A. Jalili et al, 2021;Jiang et al, 2023;Oliveira et al, 2020;Sánchez Barea et al, 2019;Wang et al, 2020).…”