A suction-type microfluidic immunosensing chip for rapid detection of the dengue virus

Abstract

The enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) is widely used in medical diagnostics. In order to reduce the diagnosis time and to lower the consumption of sample/reagents in an ELISA assay, a suction-type, automatic, pneumatically-driven microfluidic chip has been designed and fabricated in this study. The microfluidic chip integrates a multi-functional micro-transport/mixing unit, for transporting metering and mixing of samples and reagents in order to automatically perform the entire ELISA protocol. A new surface modification has been adopted which allows for a high processing capacity. The detection sensitivity for the dengue virus is found to be 10(1) PFU/ml, which is much better than a conventional ELISA assay (10(3) PFU/ml). The entire assay time is only 30 min, which is much faster than with 96-well microtiter plates (4 h). The consumed sample and reagent volume is only 12 μl, which is less than a conventional assay (100 μl). The development of this microfluidic chip may be promising for other immunosensing applications.

Polyelectrolyte Multilayers in Microfluidic Systems for Biological Applications

“…Using the same concept, Weng et al, 2011, designed a PEM-coated microfluidic platform for identifying dengue virus (DV) using ELISA [18]. The focus of this work was on the design of a device that allows for sample transport and mixing capabilities integrated into a single unit to reduce the time commonly required in conventional ELISA.…”

“…However, the stability and efficiency are improved by the use of PEMs on the channel surfaces. Weng et al, 2011, reported that the PEM/PDMS microfluidic system reduces the time required for surface modification from 24 h [17] to 2 h [18]. The PAA and PEI layers (6 nm total thicknesses) were cross-linked with amide bonds by exposing them to glutaraldehyde.…”

Layer-by-layer functionalized nanotube arrays: A versatile microfluidic platform for biodetection

“…Others have designed a microfluidic platform with LbL coatings for identifying the dengue virus through an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) approach. The results have indicated that LbL coatings on channel surfaces improve their stability and efficiency, reducing surface modification time 12-fold 48 . Alternatively, LbL-modified microfluidic systems have been used to control the flow or flow constituents within the device.…”

Development of a microplate reader compatible microfluidic chip for ELISA

“…Due to their small scale, microdevices have many practical advantages such as large specific volume, very low reagent consumption, and short diffusion length. Several developmental advances have been realized in miniaturization of capillary electrophoresisbased immunoassays (Ou et al 1999;Roper et al 2003;Herr et al 2005;Chen and Zhang 2008;Hui and Ma 2011) and microchip-based ELISA (Rossier and Girault 2001;Murakami et al 2004;Kang and Park 2005;Zhao et al 2008;Weng et al 2011;Schrott et al 2011). The capillary electrophoresis-based immunoassays utilize an electric field to separate the antigenantibody complex from the rest of the molecules in the assay solutions.…”