Abstract
Printed electronics have led to new possibilities in the detection and quantification of a wide range of molecules important for medical, biotechnological, and environmental fields. The integration with microfluidics is often adopted to avoid hand-deposition of little volumes of reagents and samples on miniaturized electrodes that strongly depend on operator’s skills. Here we report design, fabrication and test of an easy-to-use electrochemical sensor platform with microfluidics entirely realized with Aerosol Jet Printing (AJP). We printed a six-electrochemical-sensors platform with AJP and we explored the possibility to aerosol jet print directly on it a microfluidic structure without any support material. Thus, the sacrificial material removal and/or the assembly with sensors steps are avoided. The repeatability observed when printing both conductive and ultraviolet (UV)-curable polymer inks can be supported from the values of relative standard deviation of maximum 5% for thickness and 9% for line width. We designed the whole microfluidic platform to make the sample deposition (20 μL) independent from the operator. To validate the platform, we quantified glucose at different concentrations using a standard enzyme-mediated procedure. Both mediator and enzyme were directly aerosol jet printed on working electrodes (WEs), thus the proposed platform is entirely fabricated by AJP and ready to use. The chronoamperometric tests show limit of detection (LOD) = 2.4 mM and sensitivity = 2.2 ± 0.08 µA/mM confirming the effectiveness of mediator and enzyme directly aerosol jet printed to provide sensing in a clinically relevant range (3–10 mM). The average relative standard inter-platform deviation is about 8%. AJP technique can be used for fabricating a ready-to-use microfluidic device that does not need further processing after fabrication, but is promptly available for electrochemical sample analysis.
Highlights
The sensitive quantification of specific biomolecules and analytes in biological fluids, drinkable water, or food has a key role in medicine, biotechnological, and environmental research [1,2].The presence of specific biomolecules or ions above their normal levels in human fluids affects biochemical cycles and causes adverse health effects [3]
The analysis showed a slight lowering of thickness for cantilevered or stacked lines is because the new line adapts to the real geometry of the previous one
The variability observed when printing both conductive and UV-curable polymer inks was evaluated from the values of relative standard deviation lower than 5% for thickness and 9% for line width
Summary
The sensitive quantification of specific biomolecules and analytes in biological fluids, drinkable water, or food has a key role in medicine, biotechnological, and environmental research [1,2].The presence of specific biomolecules or ions above their normal levels in human fluids affects biochemical cycles and causes adverse health effects [3]. The possibility to detect contaminants, specific ions, or metals in drinkable water, beverages, or food, when still in low concentration, might bring a significant improvement in terms of food waste and of effects on human wealth [10,11]. The demand for disposable biosensors with high sensitivity, low limit of detection (LOD), repeatability, miniaturization, and cost efficiency has received increasing attention for early diagnosis and health monitoring [16]. Electrochemical biosensors (EB) are good candidates for scalable production of point-of-care (PoC) disposable devices [3,17,18] They are a feasible solution for analyzing the content of a biological fluid sample by directly converting a biological event into an electronic signal [19]
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