High-precision extraction and concentration detection of airborne disease microorganisms based on microfluidic chip

Peifeng Xu; Rongbiao Zhang; Ning Yang; Paul Kwabena Oppong; Jian Sun; Pan Wang

doi:10.1063/1.5086087

High-precision extraction and concentration detection of airborne disease microorganisms based on microfluidic chip

Biomicrofluidics. 2019 Apr 25;13(2):024110. doi: 10.1063/1.5086087. eCollection 2019 Mar.

Authors

Peifeng Xu, Rongbiao Zhang¹, Ning Yang¹, Paul Kwabena Oppong², Jian Sun¹, Pan Wang¹

Affiliations

¹ School of Electrical and Information Engineering, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang 212013, China.
² Agriculture Equipment Engineering Institute, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang 212013, China.

Abstract

Accurate monitoring of the content of specific disease micro-organisms in the air is one of the key technologies for early warning of airborne diseases. Based on the principle of aerosol particle motion in the microenvironment, this paper proposes a microfluidic chip method for accurately extracting diseased micro-organisms directly from the gas stream. The chip consists of a two-stage coupling of parallel double-sheath flow focusing and radial sheath flow acceleration. Considering the case of extracting mold spores (near spherical shape, average particle size 6 $μ$ m) and strawberry gray mold spores (near spherical shape, average particle size 10 $μ$ m) from the mixture (concentration of the mixture is about $3.4 \times 10^{8}$ /ml), the performance of the chip was evaluated using two indicators: extraction rate and purity. The results showed that the extraction rates of mold spores and gray mildew spores were 89% and 76% and the purges were 98% and 87%, respectively, achieving high-purity and accurate extraction of fungal spores and greatly improving the detection accuracy. It could be used as the development basis of microbial sensor for the early rapid detection of crop fungal diseases.