We have successfully developed a surface plasmon resonance (SPR) measurement system for the on-site immunoassay of real samples. The system is composed of a portable SPR instrument (290 mm(W) × 160 mm(D) × 120 mm(H)) and a microfluidic immunoassay chip (16 mm(W) × 16 mm(D) × 4 mm(H)) that needs no external pump system. An integrated vertical capillary tube functions as a large volume (150 μL) passive pump and a waste reservoir that has sufficient capacity for several refill operations. An immunoassay was carried out that employed the direct injection of a buffer and a test sample in sequence into a microfluidic chip that included 9 antibody bands and 10 reference reagent bands immobilized in the flow channel. By subtracting a reliable averaged reference sensorgram from the antibody, we effectively reduced the influence of the non-specific binding, and then our chip successfully detected the specific binding of spiked IgG in non-homogeneous milk. IgG is a model antigen that is certain not to be present in non-homogeneous milk, and non-homogeneous milk is a model of real sample that includes many interfering foreign substances that induce non-specific binding. The direct injection of a real sample with no pretreatment enabled us to complete the entire immunoassay in several minutes. This ease of operation and short measuring time are acceptable for on-site agricultural, environmental and medical testing.
Keywords: SPR; immunoassay; microfluidics; on-site; passive pump; raw sample.