AC electrokinetics-enhanced capacitive immunosensor for point-of-care serodiagnosis of infectious diseases

The current serological diagnostic method can be time consuming and labor intensive, which is not practical for on-site diagnosis and screening of infectious diseases. Capacitive bioaffinity detection using microelectrodes is considered as a promising label-free method for point-of-care diagnosis, though with challenges in sensitivity and the time "from sample to result." With recent development in AC electrokinetics (ACEK), especially in dielectrophoresis (DEP), we are able to develop an ACEK enhanced capacitive bioaffinity sensing method to realize simple, fast and sensitive diagnosis from serum samples. The capacitive immunosensor presented here employs elevated AC potentials at a fixed frequency for impedimetric interrogation of the microelectrodes. According to prior work, such an AC signal is capable of inducing dielectrophoresis and other ACEK effects, so as to realize in-situ enrichment of macromolecules at microelectrodes and hence accelerated detection. Experimental study of the ACEK-enhanced capacitive sensing method was conducted, and the results corroborate our hypothesis. The capacitive sensing responses showed clear frequency dependence and voltage-level dependency, which supports the hypothesis that ACEK aids the antigen-antibody binding, and these dependencies were used to optimize our detection protocol. Our capacitive sensing method was shown to work with bovine sera to differentiate disease-positive samples from negative samples within 2 min, while conventional immunoassay would require multiple processing steps and take hours to complete. The results showed high accuracy and sensitivity. The detection limit is found to reach 10 ng/ml in 2 min. The ACEK-enhanced capacitive immunosensor is a platform technology, and can be employed to detect any combination of probe (e.g. antigen) and analyte (e.g. serum antibody) in a small volume of bodily fluids.