Microfluidics Integrated Biosensors: A Leading Technology towards Lab-on-a-Chip and Sensing Applications

Abstract

A biosensor can be defined as a compact analytical device or unit incorporating a biological or biologically derived sensitive recognition element immobilized on a physicochemical transducer to measure one or more analytes. Microfluidic systems, on the other hand, provide throughput processing, enhance transport for controlling the flow conditions, increase the mixing rate of different reagents, reduce sample and reagents volume (down to nanoliter), increase sensitivity of detection, and utilize the same platform for both sample preparation and detection. In view of these advantages, the integration of microfluidic and biosensor technologies provides the ability to merge chemical and biological components into a single platform and offers new opportunities for future biosensing applications including portability, disposability, real-time detection, unprecedented accuracies, and simultaneous analysis of different analytes in a single device. This review aims at representing advances and achievements in the field of microfluidic-based biosensing. The review also presents examples extracted from the literature to demonstrate the advantages of merging microfluidic and biosensing technologies and illustrate the versatility that such integration promises in the future biosensing for emerging areas of biological engineering, biomedical studies, point-of-care diagnostics, environmental monitoring, and precision agriculture.

Applications of Microfluidics in the Agro-Food Sector: A Review

“…Microfluidics is potentially useful in performing and analyzing complex operations including diagnostics, detection of harmful materials, and biological screening. The integration of microfluidics and biosensors provides the significant ability to solve the shortcomings of conventional methods (Luka et al, 2015). Trends in microfluidic-based immunosensors include the simultaneous and parallel detection of multiple targets, and the improvement of sensitivity by using novel signal labels (Li et al, 2012).…”

Design and characterization of a passive, disposable wireless AC-electroosmotic lab-on-a-film for particle and fluid manipulation

“…During recent decades, lab-on-a-chip (LOC) technology, which deals mostly with precise manipulation of micro/nano-scale liquid and/or biological particles, has made considerable progress in the development of micro/nano-systems for chemical, biological, and medical applications [1,2]. Of the various LOC devices which have followed many are based on electrical methods, including electrophoresis (EP) [3,4] electrowetting on dielectric (EWOD) [5,6] and electrokinetics effects (including dielectrophoresis (DEP) [7][8][9][10] AC electroosmosis (ACEO) [11][12][13][14] and the electrothermal effect [15,16]).…”

Medical Devices Development: The Bottom-Up or The Top-Down Approach?

“…Clean room facilities are put to profit to perfectly control the geometry of micrometer size channels and interaction chambers (area of the µTAS where the bio-interaction takes place). As explained in reference [11], the idea of using microfabrication techniques is to reduce the volume of the biological sample under analysis. Indeed, different microfluidic principles are described together with examples of applications involving immunoassays among others [12][13][14].…”

“…Over the past decades, tremendous efforts have been put to the development of microfluidic technologies in order to propose integrated lab-on-chips or micro Total Analysis Systems (µTAS) [11]. Clean room facilities are put to profit to perfectly control the geometry of micrometer size channels and interaction chambers (area of the µTAS where the bio-interaction takes place).…”