Description

Pathogenic bacteria in an aqueous or airborne environments usually cause infectious diseases in hospital or among the general public. One critical step in the successful treatment of the pathogen-caused infections is rapid diagnosis by identifying the causative microorganisms, which helps to provide early warning of the diseases. However, current standard identification based on cell culture and traditional molecular biotechniques often depends on costly or time-consuming detection methods and equipments, which are not suitable for point-of-care tests. Microfluidic-based technique has recently drawn lots of attention, due to the advantage that it has the potential of providing a faster, more sensitive, and higher-throughput identification of causative pathogens in an automatic manner by integrating micropumps and valves to control the liquid accurately inside the chips. In this chapter, microfluidic techniques for serodiagnosis of amebiasis, allergy, and rapid analysis of airborne bacteria are described. The microfluidic chips that integrate microcolumns, protein microarray, or a staggered herringbone mixer structure with sample to answer capability have been introduced and shown to be powerful in rapid diagnosis especially in medical fields.

Chapter