Near-Field Communication Tag for Colorimetric Glutathione Determination with a Paper-Based Microfluidic Device

Here, we propose a microfluidic paper-based analytical device (µPAD) implemented with a near-field communication (NFC) tag as a portable, simple and fast colorimetric method for glutathione (GSH) determination. The proposed method was based on the fact that Ag⁺ could oxidize 3,3',5,5'-tetramethylbenzidine (TMB) into oxidized blue TMB. Thus, the presence of GSH could cause the reduction of oxidized TMB, which resulted in a blue color fading. Based on this finding, we developed a method for the colorimetric determination of GSH using a smartphone. A µPAD implemented with the NFC tag allowed the harvesting of energy from a smartphone to activate the LED that allows the capture of a photograph of the µPAD by the smartphone. The integration between electronic interfaces into the hardware of digital image capture served as a means for quantitation. Importantly, this new method shows a low detection limit of 1.0 µM. Therefore, the most important features of this non-enzymatic method are high sensitivity and a simple, fast, portable and low-cost determination of GSH in just 20 min using a colorimetric signal.