Abstract
The rapid spread of influenza-associated H1N1 viruses has caused serious concern in recent years. Therefore, there is an urgent need for the development of automatic, point-of-care devices for rapid diagnosis of the influenza virus. Conventional approaches suffer from several critical issues; notably, they are time-consuming, labor-intensive, and are characterized by low specificity. In this work, we present a new approach for fluorescence-based detection of the influenza A H1N1 virus using a sandwich-based aptamer assay that is automatically performed on an integrated microfluidic system. The entire detection process was shortened to 30 minutes using this chip-based system, and reagent consumption was decreased 5-fold in comparison to traditional methods. The limit of detection was significantly improved to 0.032 HAU due to the high affinity and high specificity of the H1N1-specific aptamers, suggesting that this microfluidic system could be useful in the detection of the H1N1 virus in situ.