Abstract
This thesis primarily describes the use of vascular bundle as a platform for the development of biochemical detections (i.e., public health related issues). The variety of vascular bundle platforms used for this research are abundance of nature resources, inexpensive easily accessible; some of them are well familiar daily instruments and products in ours living surroundings. Vascular bundle enables to transport fluids via capillary action, thus the additional energy for bumping is not required. In addition, vascular bundle materials such as bamboo and wood have the same extraordinary physical absorption prosperity as other matrix materials (e.g., paper or thread); no complicate chemical surface modification is necessary for immobilizing detection reagents. Also the fabrication of vascular bundle platforms just needs conventional mechanical processing. Therefore, the cost of the entire production is extremely low. Here we demonstrate how to take advantage of toothpicks and coffee stirrers (both are easily accessible products) as our primary materials to forge versatile biochemical detection devices, whose format are similar with dipstick no less than lateral flow tests. In order to verify the feasibility of our designed ones, we attempt to perform some unsophisticated metabolic assays (e.g., glucose assay, cholesterol assay, and nitrite analysis), and also semi-quantitative analysis. Moreover, we expect our influence could extend to not only public health system but also Taiwan’s conventional industries. Because Taiwan has the state-of the-art technologies for process as well as manufacturing (e.g., Sanyi woodcarving), we hopes we could establish bilateral profit-making business models in the light of this foundation, which will be able to infuse new life into Taiwan’s traditional industries. Keywords: Vascular bundle, coffee stirrers, toothpicks, bamboo, wood.