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.
Highlights
Biosensors are considered to be powerful analytical tools and are potentially useful for a wide range of applications ranging from drug discovery, to medical diagnostics, to food safety, to agricultural and environmental monitoring, and to security and defense [1]
The results showed that the fabricated microfluidic platform, which used Surface plasmon resonance (SPR) phase imaging successfully detected the presence of only IgG in the samples
The integration of optical absorbance measurements system with digital microfluidics for the detection of body metabolites using glucose oxidase as the biological recognition element has been reported by Srinivasan et al [122]
Summary
Biosensors are considered to be powerful analytical tools and are potentially useful for a wide range of applications ranging from drug discovery, to medical diagnostics, to food safety, to agricultural and environmental monitoring, and to security and defense [1]. The specificity and selectivity of the biosensor is determined by the catalytic or affinity properties of the biological recognition element. There are three classes of microfluidics: (i) continuous-flow; (ii) droplet-based; and (iii) digital microfluidics. Examples from the literature are presented to demonstrate the advantages of merging microfluidic and biosensor technology and illustrate the versatility that such a merging promises in the future biosensing for numerous areas of biological engineering, environmental monitoring, biomedical applications, agricultural monitoring, industrial monitoring, and point-of-care diagnostics. We have divided this review into three sections: (i) different types of biosensors (categorized based on the biological recognition elements and transducers); (ii) different types of microfluidic platforms with their advantages and disadvantages; and (iii) examples of integrated biosensors in different microfluidic platforms
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