Abstract
In this work, a new membrane-type microfluidic device was developed and incorporated with vancomycin-coated magnetic nanobeads for rapid bacteria detection, which only took 10 min to separate target bacteria from clinical human joint fluid (HJF) samples. Experimental results showed that the limit of detection could be significantly improved to be about 80 CFU/mL (or 13 CFU/reaction) by using a new three-dimensional membrane-type micromixer. As a result, we successfully demonstrated that the distinguishable fluorescence signal could be detected from a positive clinical HJF sample by using the developed diagnosis assay. The entire process including bacteria isolation in HJF, bacteria lysis, polymerase chain reaction and optical detection could be performed on a microfluidic system within 90 minutes.