Versatile and automatized microfluidic platform for quantitative magnetic beads based protocol: application to gluten detection
Abstract
A microfluidic platform for the integration of multi-step biological assays has been developed. The system combines a unique instrument compatible with microfluidic chips for various applications based on beads manipulation. Two examples of microfluidic cartridges are presented here. The first one contains two rows of eight chambers (40 and 80 µL), six reagents inlets, eight testing solutions (calibrators and samples) inlets and eight outlets to reproduce precisely each step of a biological assay. This configuration is versatile enough to integrate many different biological assays and save a lot of development time. The second architecture is dedicated to one specific protocol and is completely automatized from the standards and sample dilutions to the optical detection. The inlets are replaced by integrated linear dilutions to prepare automatically a range of standards concentration and outlets have been modified for integrated colorimetric detection. The technology uses pneumatically collapsible chambers to perform all the fluidic operations for a fully automated protocol such as volume calibrations, fluid transport, mixing, washing steps. A programmable instrument with a software interface has been developed to adapt rapidly a protocol to this cartridge. As an example, these new microfluidic cartridges have been used to successfully perform an immunoassay for gluten detection, which is a major issue in food safety.