Abstract
Abstract Porous materials have attracted much attention over the past decade on account of the advantages of high specific surface area, high volume density and tunable pore sizes. These hierarchically ordered materials can be applied to various fields, such as filters, separation, chromatography, catalytic supports, sensors and photonic band gap structure. The porous structures enhance the efficiency splendidly, and it receives much interest in fabricating the highly ordered porous materials. Among these applications, the photonic crystal structure can be designed for the optical device. The purpose of this study is to fabricate a well-ordered porous material incorporated with flow injection system for tumor marker detection. The template concentration, surfactant concentration, drying temperature, the hybrid sol-gel reaction and surface modification reaction were investigate and optimized. Results showed that 2 wt% (w/w) polystyrene can be effectively used as a template to fabricate the highly ordered porous structures in the presence of 1 CMC Tween 20. After drying the opal structure at 60 □C, a hexagonally arranged opal structure by natural gravity was formed. The hybrid sol solution prepared with tetraethoxy silicate (TEOS) and methyltrimethosy silicate (MTMS) at pH 2 was then infiltrated into the interstitial voids between polystyrenes by spin-coating. The samples were aged at room temperature and were calcined at 550 □C for the removal of polystyrene. The amino-modified structures derived from soaking with 5 % (3-aminopropyl)trimethoxy silicate (APTS) for 1 hour were incorporated with the flow injection system for biomedical detection. The flow rate of 50 □L/min to 20 min of flow time was used to detect the cancer biomarkers. The detection range of alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) was from 10 to 5000 ng/mL, which locating on the biomedical application range, while the detection of anti-Hepatitis B core antigen (anti-HBcAg) was 1 to 100 ng/mL. The detection limits of AFP and anti-HBcAg are 100 and 10 ng/mL, respectively. In conclusion, the approach developed in this study is simple, convenient, cheap and rapid. Results obtained in this study indicate the high potential application for biomedical detection of cancer biomarker.