Single nucleotide polymorphism detection using gold nanoprobes and bio-microfluidic platform with embedded microlenses.

The use of microfluidics platforms combined with the optimal optical properties of gold nanopartides has found plenty of application in molecular biosensing. This paper describes a biotnicrofluidic platform coupled to a non-cross-linking colorimetric gold nanoprobe assay to detect a single nucleotide polymorphism associated with increased risk of obesity fat-mass and obesity-associated (FTO) rs9939609 (Carlos et al., 2014). The system enabled significant discrimination between positive and negative assays using a target DNA concentration of 5 ng/mu l below the limit of detection of the conventionally used microplate reader (i.e., 15 ng/mu l) with 10 times lower solution volume (i.e., 3 mu l.). A set of optimization of our previously reported bio-microfluidic platform (Bemacka-Wojcik et al., 2013) resulted in a 160% improvement of colorimetric analysis results. Incorporation of planar microlenses increased 6 times signal-to-loss ratio reaching the output optical fiber improving by 34% the colorimetric analysis of gold nanopartides, while the implementation of an optoelectronic acquisition system yielded increased accuracy and reduced noise. The microfluidic chip was also integrated with a miniature fiber spectrometer to analyze the assays' cobrimetric changes and also the LEDs transmission spectra when illuminating through various solutions. Furthermore, by coupling an optical micmscope to a digital camera with a long exposure time (30s), we could visualise the different scatter intensities of gold nanoparticles within channels following salt addition. These intensities correlate well to the expected difference in aggregation between FTO positive (none to small aggregates) and negative samples (large aggregates). (C) 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.