Microfluidic Device Architecture for Electrochemical Patterning and Detection of Multiple DNA Sequences

Authors

Elizabeth Pavlovic, University of California, Santa Barbara
Rebecca Lai, University of Nebraska - LincolnFollow
Ting Ting Wu, University of California, Los Angeles
Brian S. Ferguson, University of California, Santa Barbara
Ren Sun, University of California, Los Angeles
Kevin W. Plaxco, University of California, Santa Barbara
H. T. Soh, University of California, Santa Barbara

Date of this Version

2008

Citation

Langmuir. 2008 February 5; 24(3): 1102–1107.

Comments

Copyright © 2008 American Chemical Society

Abstract

Electrochemical biosensors pose an attractive solution for point-of-care diagnostics because they require minimal instrumentation and they are scalable and readily integrated with microelectronics. The integration of electrochemical biosensors with microscale devices has, however, proven to be challenging due to significant incompatibilities among biomolecular stability, operation conditions of electrochemical sensors, and microfabrication techniques. Toward a solution to this problem, we have demonstrated here an electrochemical array architecture that supports the following processes in situ, within a self-enclosed microfluidic device: (a) electrode cleaning and preparation, (b) electrochemical addressing, patterning, and immobilization of sensing biomolecules at selected sensor pixels, (c) sequence-specific electrochemical detection from multiple pixels, and (d) regeneration of the sensing pixels. The architecture we have developed is general, and it should be applicable to a wide range of biosensing schemes that utilize gold–thiol self-assembled monolayer chemistry. As a proof-of-principle, we demonstrate the detection and differentiation of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplicons diagnostic of human (H1N1) and avian (H5N1) influenza.