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Abstract
This paper reviews the functions of dielectrophoresis (DEP) that have been applied to biosensor and biochip platforms for bacteria detection, including concentration of bacterial cells from continuous flows, separation of target bacterial cells from non-target cells, as well as the enhancement of antibody capture efficiency on biosensor and biochip surfaces. DEP could provide effective concentration and separation simultaneously in well-designed microfluidic biosensor and biochip systems. The integration of DEP with a detection system allows the integration of sample preparation and enrichment steps with detection, which has the potential to eliminate the traditionally used time-consuming culture-based enrichment steps and other multiple off-chip sample preparation steps. DEP is also useful in biosensor and biochips platforms for enhancing antibody capture efficiency in both flow-through and non-flow-through microdevices. The enhanced antibody capture efficiency could allow the sensor capture more cells and to be detected by the sensor, particularly in dealing with low number of cells. The integration of multifunctions of DEP into biosensor and biochip platform has the potential to improve the detection of bacterial cells.
Acknowledgments
This paper was submitted as part of a Special Issue on Biosensors organized by Dr. Yu Lei of the University of Connecticut.
The authors acknowledge the support from North Carolina BIOIMPACT Initiative and Golden Leaf Foundation through the Biomanufacturing Research and Technology Enterprises (BRITE) at North Carolina Central University.
Notes
Reprinted from Yang et al. Citation2006, Lab Chip, 6, 896-905 and by permission of The Royal Society of Chemistry, http://dx.doi.org/10.1039/B607061M.