Abstract
As the society progresses, many rapidly-spread infectious diseases emerge because the distance between individuals is getting closer and closer. Not only do these infectious diseases threaten people health significantly but they also cause huge economic loss. The key factor to cease the spread of infectious diseases is early detection and diagnosis.Researchers have devoted to develop detection and diagnostic tools which are accurate and rapid. Among all detection tools, molecular diagnosis has been extensively employed in infectious disease detection because of its high sensitivity and high specificity. It may provide accurate and sensitive detection results which could be references for making proper treatment decisions. However, complicated processes,human errors and contamination prevent its potential to be an in-filed or point-of-care tool. To overcome the above-mentioned disadvantages, four different integrated microfluidic systems were developed to detect pathogens including bacteria and viruses from aquaculture, orchids and human joint fluidic sample directly are presented in this dissertation. By means of the knowledge from bio-Micro-Electro-Mechanical-System (Bio-MEMS), the integrated microfluidic systems integrated several microfluidic components into one single biochip to realize to concept of Lab-on-a-Chip (LOC).Furthermore, the integrated control systems can be used to perform all manual steps in a traditional biomedical experiment automatically with less human intervention to save labor and cost. With Bio-MEMS, human error and contamination can also be reduced. The performances of the integrated microfluidic systems were validated in this dissertation and the results showed that the purposed microfluidic systems were highly specific with sensitivities as low as 20 copies of plasmid deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) for loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) with fluorescent detection, 35 pg of plasmid DNA for LAMP with turbidity detection, 200 colony formation units (CFU) for polymerase chain reaction (PCR) with fluorescent detection and 100 CFU for nanogold probe detection, respectively. Moreover, in this study, the whole experimental procedures including DNA/RNA/bacteria isolation, nucleic acid amplification by PCR or LAMP, nanogold probes detection or optical detection can be performed on an integrated control system which consisted of a temperature control module, a liquid transportation module and an optical detection module automatically within a short period of time. Based on the experiment data, these micro-total-analysis-systems (μTAS) are promising tools for in-field diagnosis or point-of-care in the near future.