Fabrication Of Photonic Crystal Array And Its Application In High-Throughput Bioassays

High-throughput assay is the technique that could detect a mass of samples at the same time or perform multiple tests on the same sample.High-throughput detection technologies include enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay technology,PCR technology,and so on.Generally,arrays are the main platform for high-throughput detection,such as 96-well PS microplates,gene chips,and protein chips.Although high-throughput assays have been widely adopted in the field of life sciences,medical diagnostics,and other analytical detection,the sensitivity of high-throughput assay is generally not high enough for trace detection and early detection of disease,especially.And for samples and the costly reagent,the consumption is dramatically large,which makes the detection costly.Hence,the existing researches for high-throughput detection mainly focus on the innovations of detection methods and the reduction of the cost of substrate materials,and ignore the properties of the substrate materials themselves and the innovations of methods for arrays fabrication.Therefore,we propose arrays with some special properties and adopt them in fast,inexpensive,and highly sensitive high-throughput assays.Here we focus on the goal to fabricate photonic nitrocellulose arrays with specific optical characteristics to improve the sensitivity of high-throughput detection and reduce test costs.We also take advantage of the controllable wettability of the substrate to form droplets,which could simplify the detection procedures.The detail works are as follows:(1)A photonic nitrocellulose array was fabricated and applied to high-throughput protein detection.A method of fabricating a photonic crystal array using nitrocellulose as a raw material has been developed.The preparation of photonic nitrocellulose array was realized by using the patterned printing method and self-assembly method.We also discussed the fluorescence enhancement mechanism of photonic crystal.The array was applied to the enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay for human Immunoglobulin G(IgG).This work proposed a sensitive high-throughput detection platform for protein(antigen,antibody).(2)A bio-inspired photonic nitrocellulose array was fabricated and applied to highthroughput nucleic-acid detection.On the basis of work(1),a photonic nitrocellulose array with hydrophilic/hydrophobic pattern was fabricated by simple patterned surface modification.Due to the difference in the wettability of the array to the aqueous solution,the solution can automatically form droplets on the surface of the hydrophilic photonic nitrocellulose,which eliminates complex and repeated liquid transfer operations in highthroughput detection.The discontinuous droplets serve as separate reactors in which various detection reactions can be carried out.The array was used for high sensitive highthroughput nucleic-acid detection.During the work,the mechanism of fluorescence signal amplification on the photonic nitrocellulose array and the influence of homogeneous droplet system on reaction kinetics were discussed.(3)A new method of microdroplet digital PCR based on photonic nitrocellulose hydrophilic/hydrophobic array was proposed.A patterned superhydrophobic array was printed by laser ink-jet printing to prepare a hydrophilic/hydrophobic array on a nitrocellulose photonic crystal film,and a microdroplet array was formed on the photonic nitrocellulose array for digital PCR which could absolutely quantify nucleic acids.The proposed method enriches the diversity of digital PCR detection methods to achieve fast,highly sensitive,low-cost absolute quantitative detection of nucleic acids.