Integration of microfluidics with a four-channel integrated optical Young interferometer immunosensor

This report describes an optical sensing hybrid system obtained by bonding a microfluidic system to an integrated optical (IO) four-channel Young interferometer (YI) chip. The microfluidic system implemented into a glass plate consists of four microchannels with cross-sectional dimensions of 200μm×15 μm. The microfluidic system is structured in such a way that after bonding to the IO chip, each microchannel addresses one sensing window in the four-channel YI sensor. Experimental tests show that the implementation of the microfluidics reduces the response time of the sensor from 100 s, as achieved with a bulky cuvette, to 4 s. Monitoring the anti-human serum albumine/human serum albumine (α-HSA/HSA) immunoreaction demonstrates the feasibility to use the microfluidic sensing system for immunosensing applications. In this case, a better discrimination between the bulk refractive index change and the layer formation can be made, resulting into higher accuracy and offering the prospect of being able to use the kinetics of the immunoreaction. The microfluidic sensing system shows an average phase resolution of 7×10−5×2π for different pairs of channels, which at the given interaction length of 4 mm corresponds to a refractive index resolution of 6×10−8, being equivalent to a protein mass coverage resolution of 20 fg/mm2.