Toward a Boron-Doped Ultrananocrystalline Diamond Electrode-Based Dielectrophoretic Preconcentrator

This paper presents results on immunobeads-based isolation of rare bacteria and their capture at a boron-doped ultrananocrystalline diamond (BD-UNCD) electrode in a microfluidic dielectrophoretic preconcentrator. We systematically vary the bead surface chemistry and the BD-UNCD surface chemistry and apply dielectrophoresis to improve the specific and the nonspecific capture of bacteria or beads. Immunobeads were synthesized by conjugating antibodies to epoxy-/sulfate, aldehyde-/sulfate, or carboxylate-modified beads with or without poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) coimmobilization. The carboxylate-modified beads with PEG provided the highest capture efficiency (∼65%) and selectivity (∼95%) in isolating live Escherichia coli O157:H7 from cultures containing 1000 E. coli O157:H7 colony-forming units (cfu)/mL, or ∼500 E. coli O157:H7 and ∼500 E. coli K12 cfu/mL. Higher specificity was achieved with the addition of PEG to the antibody-functionalized bead surface, highest with epoxy-/sulfate beads (85-86%), followed by carboxylate-modified beads (76-78%) and aldehyde-/sulfate beads (74-76%). The bare BD-UNCD electrodes of the preconcentrator successfully withstood 240 kV/m for 100 min that was required for the microfluidic dielectrophoresis of 1 mL of sample. As expected, the application of dielectrophoresis increased the specific and the nonspecific capture of immunobeads at the BD-UNCD electrodes; however, the capture specificity remained unaltered. The addition of PEG to the antibody-functionalized BD-UNCD surface had little effect on the specificity in immunobeads capture. These results warrant the fabrication of electrical biosensors with BD-UNCD so that dielectrophoretic preconcentration can be performed directly at the biosensing electrodes.