Polymeric microbead arrays for microfluidic applications

Microbeads offer a convenient and efficient means of immobilizing biomolecules and capturing target molecules of interest in microfluidic immunoassay devices. In this study, hot embossing is used to form wells enabling the direct incorporation of a microbead array in a plastic substrate. We demonstrate two techniques to populate the well array with beads. In the first case, encoded beads with various functionalizations are distributed randomly among the wells and their position is registered by reading their encoding. Alternatively, beads are controllably placed at predetermined positions and decoding is not required. The random placement technique is demonstrated with two functionalized bead types that are distributed among the wells and then decoded to register their locations. The alternative, deliberate placement technique is demonstrated by controllably placing magnetic beads at selected locations in the array using a magnetic probe. As a proof of concept to illustrate the biosensing capability of the randomly assembled array, an on-chip, bead-based immunoassay is employed to detect the inflammatory protein Interleukin-8. The principle of the assay, however, can be extended to detect multiple targets simultaneously. Our method eliminates the need to interface silicon components with plastic devices to form microarrays containing individually addressable beads. This has the potential to reduce the cost and complexity of lab-on-chip devices for medical diagnosis, food and water quality inspection, and environmental monitoring.