Nano-Integrated Suspended Polymeric Microfluidics (SPMF) Platform for Ultra-Sensitive Bio-Molecular Recognition of Bovine Growth Hormones

The development of sensitive platforms for the detection of biomolecules recognition is an extremely important problem in clinical diagnostics. In microcantilever (MC) transducers, surface-stress is induced upon bimolecular interaction which is translated into MC deflection. This paper presents a cost-effective and ultra-sensitive MC-based biosensing platform. To address these goals, the need for costly high-resolution read-out system has been eliminated by reducing the cantilever compliance through developing a polymer-based cantilever. Furthermore a microfluidic system has been integrated with the MC in order to enhance sensitivity and response time and to reduce analytes consumption. Gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) are synthesized on the surface of suspended microfluidics as the selective layer for biomolecule immobilization. The biosensing results show significant improvement in the sensitivity of the proposed platform compared with available silicon MC biosensor. A detection limit of 2 ng/ml (100pM) is obtained for the detection of bovine growth hormones. The results validated successful application of suspended polymeric microfluidics (SPMF) as the next generation of biosensing platforms which could enable femtomolar (fM) biomolecular recognition detection.