Abstract
The development of a reliable, effective and portable sensor is useful no matter for doctors to diagnose disease at early stage, or for the general public to monitor the amount of disease-relating factor at home. Most importantly, the price of sensor decides whether people can afford for this healthcare, and also the device operation decides whether this product can be used in resource limited area. Previous studies of developing low-cost devices partially focused on the polymer (i.e., PDMS) made device, and it is worth noting that the paper-based analytical device (PAD) showed outstanding achievement of the low-cost device development. However, the studies of paper-based analytical device were lack of nucleotides based assay that restricted the application of diagnosing virus related diseases. Here, we would like to develop a simple and efficient approach for detecting specific sequence of nucleic acids on paper-based analytical device with analyzed reports via the following procedures: 1) We employed a molecular biotechnology called RT-LAMP (reverse transcription loop-mediated isothermal amplification) for amplifying the specific sequence of nucleic acids from viruses at a constant temperature (dengue virus serotype-2 RNA in this study) and to utilize the fluorescent probes for revealing the detecting results on paper-based platform. This part helps us to develop a paper-based assay that could detect virus relevant disease. 2) We developed a portable fluorescent image recording device that is compatible with smart phone, in order to analyze the fluorescent images that are captured from the results of virus detecting assays. We tried to validate the accuracy in different fluorescent wave length, and simplified the components without affecting the performance in this portable fluorescence recording device. To take together, we hope these studies can achieve a goal that using a smart phone and a paper-based device to diagnose the virus-derived diseases. At the end of this dissertation, we also investigated the feasibility of applying paper-based platform on liquid-handling robot for the screen of specific chemical compound. Hope in the future, a paper-based platform can be employed on massive screening of chemical compounds in order to diminish the cost of chemical selection.