Abstract
It has been demonstrated that microalgae play an important role in the food, agriculture and medicine industries. Additionally, the identification and counting of the microalgae are also a critical step in evaluating water quality, and some lipid-rich microalgae species even have the potential to be an alternative to fossil fuels. However, current technologies for the detection and analysis of microalgae are costly, labor-intensive, time-consuming and throughput limited. In the past few years, microfluidic chips integrating optical components have emerged as powerful tools that can be used for the analysis of microalgae with high specificity, sensitivity and throughput. In this paper, we review recent optofluidic lab-on-chip systems and techniques used for microalgal detection and characterization. We introduce three optofluidic technologies that are based on fluorescence, Raman spectroscopy and imaging-based flow cytometry, each of which can achieve the determination of cell viability, lipid content, metabolic heterogeneity and counting. We analyze and summarize the merits and drawbacks of these micro-systems and conclude the direction of the future development of the optofluidic platforms applied in microalgal research.
Highlights
There are about 200,000 to 800,000 microalgal species, spread widely in oceans, lakes, and rivers around the world [1]
Considering that microalgae is widespread in rivers, lakes and oceans and is closely related to human health, environmental protection and economics, it is essential to develop devices that are rapid, cost-effective and portable in order to monitor the dynamics of the microalgae
As optical detection techniques have the merits of high-precision, fast, and non-contact measurement, many researchers have explored the integration of optical instruments and various microfluidic platforms for microalgal detection
Summary
There are about 200,000 to 800,000 microalgal species, spread widely in oceans, lakes, and rivers around the world [1]. Micromachines 2021, 12, 1137 methods, manual observation [2], chromatography (HPLC or GC) [16], targeting of specific molecules [17], and dielectric spectroscopy [18,19,20] have been widely applied to microalgal growth estimation, species identification, and lipid and pigment quantification. Many researchers have reported integrated fluorescence sensing [71,72,73], spectroscopy [74,75,76], and other imaging techniques [28,36,77] on microfluidic platforms, which can be applied in microalgal detection to achieve acquisitions of both morphological and intracellular information with high throughput and low cost.
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