Side-Port Puncture Needle-Assisted, Multistep Vacuum-Driven Microfluidic Chip for Multiplexed Molecular Analysis

The development of microfluidic chips for biological and chemical applications is a rapidly evolving field because these devices can perform a complex set of sequential operations on a submillimeter scale. Here, we develop a vacuum-driven microfluidic chip used for multiplexed nucleic acid detection targeting respiratory infectious pathogens, in which we employ conventional side-port puncture needles as valves to connect adjacent functional modules. This design allows a multistep operation from sample introduction to result readout within the vacuum-driven chip. The sensitivity and specificity of detection for clinical respiratory samples in our test both achieved 100% for P. aeruginosa infection. The side-port puncture needle-assisted microfluidic chip represents a promising tool for the rapid and high-throughput molecular analysis in the field of disease diagnosis and environmental monitoring.