Microfluidic Electrochemical Biosensing Chips for Food Analysis

4 Microfluidic Electrochemical Biosensing Chips for Food Analysis 

Stimulated by the current trend of micro-TAS and LOC technologies, biochemical sensor strategies have currently been incorporated in microfluidic systems for the realization of highly sophisticated systems. However, the miniaturization of microfluidic devices depends on micromachining technology and the integration of different components such as pumps and valves on a chip tends to be complicated. 

The idea followed under this section is to give an overview of the potential of electrochemical microfluidic devices as (bio)-sensor platforms devoted to agricultural and food analysis. Although these types of microdevices have been reported in an important number of published works, those associated to food analysis are very limited [57, 58]. Related to this scope, most of the published works fall within electrochemical microfluidic immunosensors. Relevant examples in food analysis will be given in this section. 

Combination of immunoassay and microfluidic platforms offers advantages related to the selectivity and sensitivity, associated to the antigen-antibody interaction with the remarkable features stated above for microfluidic platforms. Microfluidic immunoassays make use of a network of microchannels and/or immunoreactor chambers usually built in a monolithic platform (similar or even the same designs used in ME) from different materials as silicon, glass, or polymers with part of all the necessary components of an immunoassay 

The long time associated to incubation stages in conventional immunoassay can be attributed to the inefficient mass transport for the immunoreagents to move them from the bulk solution to the wall surface where interaction takes place. In microchannels, the surface-area-to-volume ratio is higher which makes the diffusional distances dramatically reduced and produce lower analysis time. 

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