Multifunctional microfluidic chip for optical nanoprobe based RNA detection - Application to Chronic Myeloid Leukemia

Pedro Urbano Alves, Raquel Vinhas, Alexandra R. Fernandes, Semra Zuhal Birol, Levent Trabzon, Iwona Bernacka-Wojcik, Rui Igreja, Paulo Lopes, Pedro Viana Baptista*, Hugo Águas, Elvira Fortunato, Rodrigo Martins

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

25 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Many diseases have their treatment options narrowed and end up being fatal if detected during later stages. As a consequence, point-of-care devices have an increasing importance for routine screening applications in the health sector due to their portability, fast analyses and decreased cost. For that purpose, a multifunctional chip was developed and tested using gold nanoprobes to perform RNA optical detection inside a microfluidic chip without the need of molecular amplification steps. As a proof-of-concept, this device was used for the rapid detection of chronic myeloid leukemia, a hemato-oncological disease that would benefit from early stage diagnostics and screening tests. The chip passively mixed target RNA from samples, gold nanoprobes and saline solution to infer a result from their final colorimetric properties. An optical fiber network was used to evaluate its transmitted spectra inside the chip. Trials provided accurate output results within 3 min, yielding signal-to-noise ratios up to 9 dB. When compared to actual state-of-art screening techniques of chronic myeloid leukemia, these results were, at microscale, at least 10 times faster than the reported detection methods for chronic myeloid leukemia. Concerning point-of-care applications, this work paves the way for other new and more complex versions of optical based genosensors.

Original languageEnglish
Article number381
JournalScientific Reports
Volume8
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Dec 2018

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 The Author(s).

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