Using airbrushes to pattern reagents for microarrays and paper-fluidic devices

摘要

An innovative technique that uses airbrushes to pattern reagents onto substrates offers a simple and cheap solution for medical diagnostics. DNA and protein microarrays have become powerful tools in the cost-effective and timely diagnosis of infectious diseases. They are also increasingly important for point-of-care testing. However these techniques require tiny amounts of DNA or protein reagents to be deposited onto materials such as paper, glass or plastic in a uniform and reproducible manner — which can prove wasteful and costly. This prompted Hugh Fan and colleagues at the University of Florida, United States, to develop a method that airbrushes reagents onto paper and glass in patterns from hundreds of micrometers to tens of millimeters in size. Their results open the door to basic and inexpensive paper-based microfluidic devices for disease diagnosis.