A highly sensitive microfluidic device for bacterial detection in blood serum

Abstract

Highly sensitive device to detect bacteria in blood serum is presented. The device comprises of a microfluidic component and an electronic reader. The microfluidic cassette acts as an enclosed vial. It is filled with the sample after mixing with an indicator dye. Then, it is inserted into a kinetics fluorometer. The rate of the fluorescence increase is proportional to the number of viable cells in the sample. The fluorometer is portable. The device was tested with both lyophilized and fresh whole blood serums that were spiked with E.coli. Concentrations as low as 10 CFU/mL were detected. This paper discusses both the procedure to detect the bacteria as well as the results for different bacterial concentrations.